This book argues that many of the mid-twentieth century's significant novelists were united by a desire to return the increasingly interior novel to ethical engagement. They did not seek morality in society, politics or the individual will, but sought to unveil a transcendent Good by using techniques drawn from the canon of mystical literature

At the end of the 1740s, the Moravians, a young and rapidly expanding radical-Pietist movement, experienced a crisis soon labeled the Sifting Time. As Moravian leaders attempted to lead the church away from the abuses of the crisis, they also tried to erase the memory of this controversial and embarrassing period. Archival records were systematically destroyed, and official histories of the church only dealt with this period in general terms. It is not surprising that the Sifting Time became both a taboo and an enigma in Moravian historiography. In A Time of Sifting, Paul Peucker provides the first book-length, in-depth look at the Sifting Time and argues that it did not consist of an extreme form of blood-and-wounds devotion, as is often assumed. Rather, the Sifting Time occurred when Moravians began to believe that the union with Christ could be experienced not only during marital intercourse but during extramarital sex as well. Peucker shows how these events were the logical consequence of Moravian teachings from previous years. As the nature of the crisis became evident, church leaders urged the members to revert to their earlier devotion of the blood and wounds of Christ. By returning to this earlier phase, the Moravians lost their dynamic character and became more conservative. It was at this moment that the radical-Pietist Moravians of the first half of the eighteenth century reinvented themselves as a noncontroversial evangelical denomination.

The novels of Australia’s Nobel Laureate Patrick White (1912–1990) are a persistent commentary on Nietzsche’s proclamation of God’s death. As White knew the proclamation was not about God’s existence, but about classical views of God, it presented him with the impossible task of using language to describe what language cannot describe. This has always been one of the more misunderstood aspects of his literary vision. Because the announcement is often interpreted in antithetical ways, atheistic, theistic, secular, religious, humanistic and fatalistic, critics should gain a better understanding of what White was trying to achieve by comparing him with his post-war contemporaries from England, Scotland, and Canada: Iris Murdoch, William Golding, Muriel Spark and Robertson Davies. After, and because of, the war, these authors all commented on the consequences of God’s death. Along with White, they worked with a shared pattern of tropes to explore the light and dark aspects of western consciousness and the civilization it has produced. Where did the pattern come from? Was it metaphysical or metapsychological? These questions are complex as the pattern came from many sources, simultaneously and synergistically, but this book tackles these questions by describing that pattern.

The historical novel is a genre which has enjoyed widespread popularity in Germany from its beginnings in the eighteenth century. At that time, increased literacy among the middle and lower classes had resulted in a greater demand for reading material aimed at a general audience. Because of its educational and entertaining characteristics, the historical novel quickly became a dominant genre among other forms of popular literature. To this day, it constitutes a major sector on the German book market and is, together with popular TV series, documentaries, and museum exhibits, an important part of German Geschichtskultur. This collection of essays looks at aesthetic and thematic continuities, as well as changes in the development of the genre in Germany from the late eighteenth century to the present, and gives insights into the novels’ political and socio-cultural implications. The articles investigate historical novels from writers such as Benedikte Naubert, the ‘mother’ of German historical fiction, nineteenth-century popular writers Georg Ebers and Hermann Sudermann, modern writers such as Alfred Döblin, Hermann Hesse, and Hermann Broch, post-Wende works such as those by Thomas Brussig, Christa Wolf, and Ingo Schulze, and contemporary historical fiction by Sabine Weigand, Eveline Hasler and Petra Durst-Benning.

During and after the Second World War, there was a concerted thinking about religion in Britain. Not only were leading international thinkers of the day theologians--Ronald Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Jacques Maritain--but leading writers contributed to discussions about religion. Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, and Barbara Pym incorporated miracles, evil, and church-going into their novels, while Louis MacNeice, T. S. Eliot, and C. S. Lewis gave radio broadcasts about the role of Christianity in contemporary society. Certainly the war revived interest in aspects of Christian life. Salvation and redemption were on many people's minds. The Ministry of Information used images of bombed churches to stoke patriotic fervour, and King George VI led a series of Days of National Prayer that coincided with crucial events in the Allied campaign. After the war and throughout the 1950s, approximately 1.4 million Britons converted to Roman Catholicism as a way of expressing their spiritual ambitions and solidarity with humanity on a world-wide scale. Religion provided one way for writers to answer the question, 'what is man?' It also afforded ways to think about social obligation and ethical engagement. Moreover, the mid-century turn to religion offered ways to articulate statehood, not from the perspective of nationhood and politics, but from the perspective of moral action and social improvement. Instead of being a retreat into seclusion and solitude, the mid-century turn to religion is a call to responsibility.

Brokering Culture in Britain's Empire and the Historical Novel examines the relationship between the historical sensibilities of nineteenth-century British and American “romancers” and the conceptual frameworks that eighteenth-century imperial interlocutors used to imagine and critique their own experiences of Britain’s diffused, tenuous, and often accidental authority. Salyer argues that this cultural experience, more than what Lukács had in mind when he wrote of a mass historical consciousness after Napoleon, gave rise to the Romantic historiographical approach of writers such as Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Brockden Brown and Frederick Marryat. This book traces the conversion of the eighteenth-century imperial speaker into the nineteenth-century “romance” hero through a number of proto-novelistic responses to the problem of Imperial history, including Edmund Burke in the Annual Register and the celebrated court case of James Annesley, among others. The author argues that popular Romantic novels such as Scott’s Waverley and Cooper’s The Pioneers convert the problem of narrating the political geographies of eighteenth-century Empire into a discourse of history, placing the historical realities of negotiating Imperial authority at the heart of a nineteenth-century project that fictionalized the possibilities and limits of political historical agency in the modern nation state.

Mysticism in the Theater introduces theater makers to the power and possibility of using historical mystical ideas to influence all aspects of a production. Historical mysticism represents ideas developed by recognized spiritual thinkers in all religions and time periods: individuals who stilled their ego, and perceived the unity of all, hidden within the apparent multiplicity of existence. This unique manner of spiritual inlay allows theatrical presentations to find the height of artistic expression: art at the intersection of our historical moment and the eternal. This study introduces theater makers to the history of mystical inspiration within performance work and develops strategies for inserting mystical ideas into their productions. The book ties this model into theatre’s history, as mystical ideas and quotes have been inserted into productions from Greek theatre through Shakespeare and into the present day. This book explores how teachings and ideas of specific historical mystical thinkers might influence all aspects of contemporary theatrical productions including writing, directing, acting, stagecraft/set design, lighting design, costume design, sound design, and choreography.

Victorian Cosmopolitanism and English Catholicity in the Mid-Century Novel argues that the Creedal doctrines of “the communion of saints” and the “holy Catholic Church” provided Victorian novelists—both Roman Catholic and Protestant—with a means of exploring religious forms of cosmopolitanism. Building on research exploring the divisions between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism in Victorian literature and culture, Teresa Huffman Traver considers the extent to which anti-Catholicism, domesticity, and national identity were linked. Huffman Traver connects this research with cosmopolitan theory, and analyzes how the conception of Catholicity could be used to reach beyond national identity towards a transnational community. Investigating the idea of a “rooted” cosmopolitanism, grounded in the local and limited in scope, this Pivot book offers a new angle on how religion, domesticity, and national identity were constructed in nineteenth-century British culture.

False Mystics provides a history of popular religion, race, and gender in colonial Mexico focusing on questions of spiritual and social rebellion and conformity. Nora E. Jaffary examines more than one hundred trials of ?false mystics? whom the Mexican Inquisition prosecuted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While the accused experienced many of the same phenomena as bona fide mystics?visions, sacred illness, and bouts of demonic possession?the Mexican tribunal condemned them nevertheless. False Mystics examines why the Catholic church viewed the accused as deviants and argues that this categorization was due in part to unconventional aspects of their spirituality and in part to contemporary social anxieties over class and race mixing, transgressions of appropriate gendered behavior, and fears of Indian and African influences on orthodox Catholicism. Jaffary examines the transformations this category of heresy underwent between Spain and the New World and explores the relationship between accusations of "false" mysticism and contemporary notions of demonic possession, sickness, and mental illness. Jaffary adopts the perspectives of visionaries to examine the influence of colonial artwork on their spiritual imaginations and to trace the reasons that their spirituality diverged from conventional expressions of piety. False Mystics illuminates the challenges that popular religion and individual spirituality posed to both the institutional church and the colonial social order.

Mystics are path-breaking religious practitioners who claim to have experience the infinite, word-defying Mystery that is God. Many have been gifted writers with an uncanny ability to communicate the great realities of life with both a theologian's precision and a poet's lyricism. They use words to jolt us into recognizing ineffable mysteries surging beneath the surface of our lives and within the depths of our hearts and, by their artistry, can awaken us to see and savor fugitive glimpses of a God-drenched world. In Mystics, William Harmless, S.J., introduces readers to the scholarly study of mysticism. He explores both mystics' extraordinary lives and their no-less-extraordinary writings using a unique case-study method centered on detailed examinations of six major Christian mystics: Thomas Merton, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard of Bingen, Bonaventure, Meister Eckhart, and Evagrius Ponticus. Rather than presenting mysticism as a subtle web of psychological or theological abstractions, Harmless's case-study approach brings things down to earth, restoring mystics to their historical context. Harmless highlights the pungent diversity of mystical experiences and mystical theologies. Stepping beyond Christianity, he also explores mystical elements within Islam and Buddhism, offering a chapter on the popular Sufi poet Rumi and one on the famous Japanese Zen master Dogen. Harmless concludes with an overview of the century-long scholarly conversation on mysticism and offers a unique, multifaceted optic for understanding mystics, their communities, and their writings. Geared toward a wide audience, Mystics balances state-of-the-art scholarship with accessible, lucid prose.