THEOLOGY AND ENGLISH LITERATURE: FROM CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE TO ALEXANDER POPE

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 82
Author(s):  
Suruchi Kumari ◽  
Ashish Alexander

Generally, it is not obvious to people that theology has contributed a lot in the formation of English literature. So, this paper tries to picture and convince how the writings of English Literature writers have impacts and influences in themselves from the biblical theology. Writers like William Shakespeare uses the theology of grace in his play All’s Well That’s End Well. John Milton pens theology of Freedom of Choice.John Donne writes Trinitarian Theology. Christopher Marlowe shows the theology of Doctor Faustus, which shines under the title like purgatory the highest junction. Alexander Pope reflects the theology of participation in self Salvation and shows theodicy in his work. Theology and English literature go together. They are inseparable. Theology is interwoven in English Literature. It appears convincingly that William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Donne, Christopher Marlowe, and Alexander Pope have sufficiently left grains in their writings which compel to justify the significance of theology in English Literature.Thus, a high degree of significance the biblical theology immerges within the arena of English Literature which may be taught to the English literature readers with a well stuff of biblical theology which is very much beneficial for the understanding of English literature knowers.  

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 82-87
Author(s):  
Suruchi Kumari ◽  
Ashish Alexander

Generally, it is not obvious to people that theology has contributed a lot in the formation of English literature. So, this paper tries to picture and convince how the writings of English Literature writers have impacts and influences in themselves from the biblical theology. Writers like William Shakespeare uses the theology of grace in his play All’s Well that’s End Well. John Milton pens theology of Freedom of Choice. John Donne writes Trinitarian Theology. Christopher Marlowe shows the theology of Doctor Faustus, which shines under the title like purgatory the highest junction. Alexander Pope reflects the theology of participation in self Salvation and shows theodicy in his work. Theology and English literature go together. They are inseparable. Theology is interwoven in English Literature. It appears convincingly that William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Donne, Christopher Marlowe, and Alexander Pope have sufficiently left grains in their writings which compel to justify the significance of theology in English Literature. Thus, a high degree of significance the biblical theology immerges within the arena of English Literature which may be taught to the English literature readers with a well stuff of biblical theology which is very much beneficial for the understanding of English literature knower.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gema Chocano Díaz ◽  
Noelia Hernando Real

On Literature and Grammar gives students and instructors a carefully thought experience to combine their learning of Middle and Early Modern English and Medieval and Renaissance English Literature. The selection of texts, which include the most commonly taught works in university curricula, allows readers to understand and enjoy the evolution of the English language and the main writers and works of these periods, from William Langland to Geoffrey Chaucer, from Sir Philip Sidney to Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and from Christopher Marlowe to William Shakespeare. Fully annotated and written to answer the real needs of current Spanish university students, these teachable texts include word-by-word translations into Present Day English and precise introductions to their linguistic and literary contexts.


Author(s):  
Erin A. McCarthy

Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England focuses on early modern publishers’ efforts to identify and accommodate new readers of verse that had previously been restricted to particular social networks in manuscript. Focusing on the period between the maturing of the market for printed English literature in the 1590s and the emergence of the professional poet following the Restoration, this study shows that poetry was shaped by—and itself shaped—strong print publication traditions. By reading printed editions of poems by William Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer, John Donne, and others, this book shows how publishers negotiated genre, gender, social access, reputation, literary knowledge, and the value of English literature itself. It uses literary, historical, bibliographical, and quantitative evidence to show how publishers’ strategies changed over time. Ultimately, Doubtful Readers argues that although—or perhaps because—publishers’ interpretive and editorial efforts are often elided in studies of early modern poetry, their interventions have had an enduring impact on our canons, texts, and literary histories.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 44-53
Author(s):  
Edward R. Raupp

Arguably, the three most important early writers in the English language – indeed, one might say the founders of the language – are Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400), William Shakespeare (1564-1616), and John Milton (1608-1674).  Yet our experience at the higher level of education is that students have had little exposure to the life and times of these writers or of their work.  Our study shows that, while some Georgian school leavers have been exposed briefly to a bit of Shakespeare, few have chanced to encounter Chaucer and none to Milton.  Moreover, while teaching what we might call “The Big Three” of English language and literature, much the same might be said at the master’s level: a bit of Shakespeare, little of Chaucer, and none of Milton.  To the extent that students of English as a foreign language encounter any literature at all, they tend to be offered little other than literal translation.  “Retell the text.”  They miss the nuances of the English language as they would encounter them through the greatest of writers.  It is, therefore, essential that those who teach any or all of these great writers develop a strategy to fit the needs of the students while meeting the objectives of the course.  The key to making sense of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton is to make connections to what students already know, to their own experiences, to make these greatest of all English writers relevant to the lives of the students in ways they can understand. Keywords: English literature, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton


2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-294
Author(s):  
Ina Schabert

In this period the city of Rouen is known for commercial activity and for certain literary connections, but its status as a centre of sorts for English-French translation has gone unrecognized. This paper explores the writers involved (some well known, some less familiar), the rationales for their translations (particularly from the poetry of Alexander Pope), and their relation on the one hand to the commercial life of Rouen, on the other to its Académie Royale, founded in 1744.


Author(s):  
Maggie Vinter

Last Acts: The Art of Dying on the Early Modern Stage argues that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater offered playwrights, actors, and audiences important opportunities to practice arts of dying. Early modern plays also engage with devotional traditions that understand death less as an occasion for suffering or grieving than as an action to be performed, well or badly. Active deaths belie the narratives of helplessness and loss most often used to analyze representations of mortality and instead suggest ways that marginalized and constrained subjects might participate in the political, social, and economic management of life. Some of these strategies for dying resonate with ecclesiastical forms or with descriptions of biopolitics within the recent work of Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. Yet the art of dying is not solely a discipline imposed upon recalcitrant subjects. Since it offers suffering individuals a way to enact their deaths on their own terms, it discloses both political and dramatic action in their most minimal manifestations. Rather than mournfully marking what we cannot recover, the practice of dying reveals what we can do, even in death. By analyzing representations of dying in plays by writers including Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson alongside both devotional texts and contemporary biopolitical theory, Last Acts shows how theater reflects, enables, and contests the politicization of life and death.


Author(s):  
David Francis Taylor

This book explores how the works of William Shakespeare, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, and others were taken up by caricaturists as a means of helping the eighteenth-century British public make sense of political issues, outrages, and personalities. The first in-depth exploration of the relationship between literature and visual satire in this period, the book explores how great texts, seen through the lens of visual parody, shape how we understand the political world. It offers a fascinating, novel approach to literary history.


Author(s):  
Vincent Gillespie

As he faced his own dissolution, Henry VIII repeatedly invoked a religious group who had been absent from his kingdom for seven years: the monks. The 1570s saw an irrevocable change in the nature of English Catholicism as Catholic clergy trained in England died, retired, or conformed. During this period, the first waves of Englishmen trained in the new continental “seminaries” as Catholic secular priests swore allegiance to the universal Church and to the Pope as missionaries for Christ. Moreover, the new orders such as the Theatines, the Capuchins, and the Jesuits eclipsed traditional European and coenobitic monasticism. This article examines the cultural disappearance of monks, monasteries, and monasticism in England during the late medieval period. It also considers how authors such as William Shakespeare, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Thomas Walsingham, Barnabe Googe, John Donne, William Langland, and Geoffrey Chaucer remember the monks in their works.


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