scholarly journals THE BAPTISM OF A PRODIGAL SON IN MARILYNNE ROBINSON’S GILEAD

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 319-329
Author(s):  
BiXia Sun
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Process ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Life Changes ◽  
Marilynne Robinson ◽  
Prodigal Son ◽  
Religious Ritual ◽  
The Bible ◽  
True Meaning ◽  
Mixed Feelings ◽  
Religious Thoughts

As a contemporary American female writer, a devout Christian, Marilynne Robinson gets her religious thoughts fully manifested in her Gilead. The novel is actually a home epistle that an aged and ailing father Ames passes to his 7-year-old innocent son, which narrates the three priesthood generations’ life changes from the Civil War to 1956 by making use of Ames’s first-person narration. However, the outsider John Ames Boughton (Jack) has been subject to diverse academic interest, which proves that he dominates an important textual place. This research makes the priest Ames’s baptism for prodigal Jack as an entry point. Ames has baptized Jack and has to reluctantly confer the name “John Ames” to Jack under the request of his bosom friend Boughton. Due to Ames’s mixed feelings (jealousy) in addition to Jack’s own diverse prodigality, Ames does not want to accept Jack at all. With the focus on the tiny difference between the religious ritual baptism and the true meaning of baptism in the novel, this research aims to put forward that the priest Ames has dilemma in conveying the Bible doctrine “love your neighbors”. However, at the end of novel, after seeing the unacceptable prodigal’s love and responsibility toward his old father, colored wife and interracial son, Ames starts to introspect his inappropriate attitude toward Jack. Under the guidance of the divine epiphany, Ames is willing to accept Jack and to give Jack the spiritual consolation. By analyzing Ames’s inner conflicts between his own “covetise” and the divine epiphany—the developmental process of Ames’s acceptance of unacceptable prodigal godson, this paper hopes to argue that the last blessing Ames gives to Jack reveals that Ames’s divine epiphany overwhelms his human nature—covetise which enables him to accept even to love the unacceptable people or unpleasant things in life so as to make faith and spiritual pursuit truly become a part of contemporary life.

scholarly journals Voltaire’s Comedy The Prodigal Son in Dostoevsky’s Novel The Adolescent

2021 ◽  
pp. 16-38
Author(s):  
Tatiana G. Magaril-Il’iaeva
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Life Strategies ◽  
Prodigal Son ◽  
Significant Element ◽  
The Bible

Through the example of Voltaire’s comedy The Prodigal Son, the article shows how Dostoevsky actualizes the worldview and life strategies behind the imagery of other authors, when using their texts in his novel The Adolescent. Nonetheless, Dostoevsky, not only reproposes several different perspectives, but also engages in a dialogue with them and transforms them according to his aim as. Dostoevsky thoroughly weaves the slightly mentioned comedy by the French philosopher into the fabric of the text, and the writer works with it in several mutually dependent directions at once. The quote (taken from the preface, not from the play) stresses the matters that are raised in the preface and the preface itself as a significant element of the composition. The French sentence borrowed by Versilov relates his image with Voltaire’s, as it was perceived by Dostoevsky. In the novel Dostoevsky reflects on the motif of the prodigal son as it is presented in the Bible and also in its transformed version by Voltaire.

scholarly journals Voltaire’s Comedy The Prodigal Son in Dostoevsky’s Novel The Adolescent

2021 ◽  
pp. 16-38
Author(s):  
Tatiana G. Magaril-Il’iaeva
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Life Strategies ◽  
Prodigal Son ◽  
Significant Element ◽  
The Bible

Through the example of Voltaire’s comedy The Prodigal Son, the article shows how Dostoevsky actualizes the worldview and life strategies behind the imagery of other authors, when using their texts in his novel The Adolescent. Nonetheless, Dostoevsky, not only reproposes several different perspectives, but also engages in a dialogue with them and transforms them according to his aim as. Dostoevsky thoroughly weaves the slightly mentioned comedy by the French philosopher into the fabric of the text, and the writer works with it in several mutually dependent directions at once. The quote (taken from the preface, not from the play) stresses the matters that are raised in the preface and the preface itself as a significant element of the composition. The French sentence borrowed by Versilov relates his image with Voltaire’s, as it was perceived by Dostoevsky. In the novel Dostoevsky reflects on the motif of the prodigal son as it is presented in the Bible and also in its transformed version by Voltaire.

Black Books and Brownies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Milbank
Keyword(s):  
Historical Change ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Black Book ◽  
James Hogg ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Future

Scottish fiction about the Reformation is concerned with the mechanics of historical change, which are rendered through a series of enchanted books and people discussed in Chapter 8. In the novel, The Monastery, describing the Dissolution and Reformation, Scott gothicizes the Bible as a magic book and the White Lady as its guardian to dramatize the mysterious nature of religious change, the dependence of the future on a Gothic past, and the need for interpretation. In Old Mortality, Scott’s protagonist escapes the frozen dualities of Covenanter and Claverhouse, revealing historical change itself as problematic in Humean terms and requiring a leap of faith. James Hogg contests this presentation of the Covenanters by re-enchanting them as supposed brownies, as mediators of history and nature, and in his Three Perils of Man reprises Scott’s wizard Michael Scott pitted against Roger Bacon and his ‘black book’ the Bible to present the Reformation as an eternal reality.

scholarly journals Conjectural History and Scottish Philosophers

2006 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger L. Emerson
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Process ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Economic Dynamic ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Intellectual Milieu ◽  
Conjectural History ◽  
Naturalistic Account ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Travel Accounts

Abstract "Conjectural history" is used here to "denote any rational or naturalistic account of the origins and development of institutions, beliefs or practices not based on documents or copies of documents or other artifacts contemporary (or thought to be contemporary) with the subjects studied." Many recent historians have focused on the apparent emergence within Scotland of a large number of sophisticated conjectural histories around ¡750, and analysed them within the framework of a Marxist-oriented social science. This paper argues that such a perspective is "inappropriate and misguided." If one looks at these works as an outcome of what went before, rather than a forerunner of what came after, they begin to lose their modernistic flavour. Conjectural histories of the Scottish Enlightenment were based essentially on four sources: the Bible and its commentaries, the classics, modern works of philosophy and travel accounts. Each had an influence on the works produced. The parallels between the Biblical and the secular conjectural histories are, for example, instructive and it is clear that no Scottish historian could consistently hold a doctrine of economic deter- minism or historical materialism and still reconcile this position with his Calvinist beliefs. Works such as Lucretius' On the Nature of Things had influenced the con- jectural histories of the Renaissance and continued to be used by the Scots just as they were by the English deists, whose speculations about historical development were also helpful to Scottish writers. Travel accounts provided information concerning mankind at various stages of civilization, but no explanation of the developmental process. While the study of history was a popular pursuit during the Scottish Enlightenment this inte rest followed trends on the continent and elsewhere. Furthermore, an examination of the great works of this period suggests that they were firmly based on the writings of scholars of a generation before. Certainly the leading writers of the "golden age" from roughly 1730 to 1790 gave a more sophisticated, detailed and elaborate treatment cf these ideas, but the sources, problems and concepts which they elucidated were not new. In their analyses, they did not employ historical materialism or economic determinism, though they were undoubtedly more political-economic, dynamic and secular in their attitude. They desired change for Scotland out of a patriotic regard for the comparative backwardness of their country, but the causes and cures for that condition were not fundamentally economic in nature. If these writings are examinedas a unit, and seen in context, the conjectural historians of the Scottish Enlightenment appear to be an understandable outcome of their intellectual milieu. The author supports this conclusion by a close examination of the work of Hume and Smith. This further explicates his theme that a nascent economic determinism was not the impetus for this writing that recent historians have read into these works.

scholarly journals Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping: Sylvie’s Fundamental Mentorship through New Western Historicism and Ecofeminist Criticism

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Zastrow
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
Marilynne Robinson ◽  
Old West ◽  
Ecofeminist Criticism

In the novel Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson discusses main character, Sylvie’s, relationship with nature in a way that revises what many New Western historians view as the Old West’s destructive ideology toward nature. Sylvie lives in opposition to what is seen as the aggressive mannerisms of Old Western males, individuals who have attempted to conquer both women and nature through their disregard for the female histories of the Old West as well as through their degradation of the faultless Western land. An effort that brings together both of these ideas, a concept that connects the maltreatment of women as well as of nature throughout history, ecofeminist philosophies are, in turn, relevant to a discussion of Robinson’s Sylvie and her New Western principles. Both viewpoints express a historical overlap of women and nature; therefore, Sylvie’s actions, which contradict the conquering mentalities of the Old West, also align with fundamental ecofeminist principles. Her actions throughout the novel possess an understanding and admiration of nature’s character as well as a voice that disagrees with the mistreatment that it receives.

The Epic Tradition

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isobel Hurst
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Criticism ◽  
Epic Tradition ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Aurora Leigh ◽  
Four Books ◽  
Daunting Challenge ◽  
Idylls Of The King

Epic occupied a prominent position as the highest test of poetic genius, yet any poet imprudent enough to attempt an epic would be faced with a daunting challenge. For a Victorian poet the attempt to rival Homer or Virgil involved complex considerations of form, theme, and history. The genre was traditionally associated with heroism and masculine strength, mythology, and the shaping of national identity, religion, and war, and with the poet’s own desire to compete with and surpass his predecessors much as epic heroes seek to prove their own supremacy. The reception of ancient epic was an ongoing concern in the period, since Homer in particular was cited as a model in literature, politics, and morality. Matthew Arnold’s prescriptions for translating Homer conveyed a sense of the responsibility involved in disseminating classical texts to a new readership. The Iliad was appropriated in debates on divorce, masculinity, authorship, and the historical criticism of the Bible. The Odyssey offered an alternative, novelistic version of Homeric epic, one which prioritized domesticity and highlighted the poem’s female characters. Some of the most influential creative responses to the epic tradition were not poems in twelve or twenty-four books but verse novels, dramatic monologues, or theatrical burlesques. Others took up the challenge of writing at epic length and addressing national concerns. For aspiring epic poets, there were many choices to be made: should poetry inhabit a mythological world, whether Arthurian (Tennyson’s Idylls of the King or Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse) or Norse (William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung), or a contemporary domain like that of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh? Might the epic be used to intervene in religious controversies or political conflicts such as Chartism? Could a modern poet be the Virgil of the British Empire? Facing strong competition from the novel, ambitious Victorian poets chose to approach such questions and an astonishing range of themes in a form which evoked vast expanses of time and space, extraordinary physical and intellectual achievement, and literary renown. Yet to achieve recognition as an epic poet remains an unusual distinction. Despite recent critical attention to the proliferation of Victorian poems with epic aspirations, a small number of poems by Tennyson, Barrett Browning, and William Morris have continued to dominate accounts of the genre.

The Prodigal Son and Shakespeare

2018 ◽  
pp. 47-68
Author(s):  
Alison M. Jack
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
Original Text ◽  
Prodigal Son ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Henry Iv ◽  
Geneva Bible

In this chapter the ubiquity of references to the Prodigal Son in Shakespeare’s work is explored, leading to a discussion of Shakespeare’s use of the Bible in general and of the Geneva Bible in particular. Two plays are considered in detail: Henry IV Part 1 and King Lear. It is suggested that Shakespeare offers a creative exegesis, or midrash, of the parable in both plays. In the first, the parable is reworked in a way which leads the reader to question the motives of both Hal and the Prodigal in the original text. In the second, the complex overlay of the parable on the plot and characterization offers at least the possibility of grace and hope at the end of the play.

scholarly journals Ons wag op die kaptein (Elsa Joubert): Bybel en Christendom as intertekste

Literator ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-62
Author(s):  
M. J. Prins
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
The Bible ◽  
The People ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Basic Beliefs

The Bible and Christianity are the most important intertexts in the novels of Elsa Joubert. The purpose of this article is to examine the part played by these intertexts in Ons wag op die kaptein. To this end the relationship between certain passages of Scripture as well as some basic beliefs of Christianity and aspects of the novel are examined: the theme, Ana-Paula's attitude towards the people of Africa as well as to her white subordinates, Carlos' treatment of his labourers, the significance of the arrival of the ‘captain' and the reconciliation which takes place during the very last moments before this arrival. Finally a brief look is taken at the link between the above-mentioned intertexts and some of the leading motifs in the narrative.

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