Chapters in this book

1. Front Matter i
2. Contents vii
3. Acknowledgements xi
4. Illustrations xiii
5. Trauma and Transcendence: An Introduction xv
6. The Classical and Biblical Inheritance
7. Sacred Proposals and The Spiritual Sublime 3
8. Medieval Visions and Dreams
9. “Loke In: How Weet a Wounde is Heere!”: The Wounds of Christ as a Sacred Space in English Devotional Literature 25
10. Suffering in the Service of Venus: The Sacred, the Sublime, and Chaucerian Joy in the Middle Part of the Parliament of Fowls 39
11. Shakespearean Horror
12. Listening to Lavinia: Emmanuel Levinas’s Saying and Said in Titus Andronicus 57
13. Precious Stories: The Discursive Economy in Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece 71
14. Metaphysical Afflications
15. The Sacred Pain of Penitence: The Theology of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets 87
16. Bearing the Cross: The Christian’s Response to Suffering in Herbert’s The Temple 97
17. The Ethical Romantic Sublime
18. Horrific Suffering, Sacred Terror, and Sublime Freedom in Helen Maria Williams’s Peru 113
19. Joanna Baillie and the Christian Gothic: Reforming Society through the Sublime 129
20. Suffering and Sacrament in The Nineteenth Century
21. Sacramental Suffering and the Waters of Redemption and Transformation in George Eliot’s Fiction 145
22. Christina Rossetti and the Poetics of Tractarian Suffering 155
23. Suffering in Word and in Truth: Seventeenth-and Nineteenth-Century Quaker Women’s Autobiography 169
24. Sacred Modernism(S)
25. Sacramental Imagination: Eucharists of the Ordinary Universe in the Works of Joyce, Proust, and Woolf 183
26. The Via Negativa in Forster’s A Passage to India 223
27. The Fellowship of Suffering and Hope in Fantasy Literature
28. Consolation in Un/certainty: The Sacred Spaces of Suffering in the Children’s Fantasy Literature of George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, and Madeleine L’Engle 235
29. The Messiah of History: The Search for Synchronicity in Miller’s A canticle for leibowitz 243
30. Violation and Redemption in Canadian Fiction
31. Suffering and the Sacred: Hugh Hood’s The New Age / Le nouveau siècle 257
32. Fictional Violations in Alice Munro’s Narratives 269
33. The American Sublime
34. Thomas Merton and the Aesthetics of the Sublime: “A Beautiful Terror” 289
35. Belated Beloved: Time, Trauma, and the Sublime in Toni Morrison’s Beloved 299
36. Annie Dillard on Holy Ground: The Artist as Nun in the Postmodern Sublime 317
37. Japanese (Re)Visioning of The Suffering Christ
38. Passion Plays by Proxy: The Paschal Face as Interculturality in the Works of Endo Shusaku and Mishima Yukio 329
39. Postmodern Aesthetics and Beyond
40. Testifying to the Infinity of the Other: The Sacred and Ethical Dimensions of Secondary Witnessing in Anne Karpf ’s The War After 349
41. Sacred Space and the Fellowship of Suffering in the Postmodern Sublime 363
42. Suffering Divine Things: Cruciform Reasoning or Incarnational Hermeneutics 377
43. Bibliography 401
44. Notes On Contributors 429
45. Index 435