Sons and Fathers

Paternalism and revolt, continuity and change, filial piety and Romantic radicalism: these are aspects of one theme. That literary theme is often expressed in the form of a religious paradox. In the past several hundred years the unity of a divine Father with a Son divine while yet human has been questioned, denied, worried over in its secular and psychological as much as its theological impli- cations by those who, themselves sons and literary if not literal fathers, write about generating forces within imagined time--such writers as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Carlyle, Ruskin, Dickens, Arnold, Yeats, Joyce, Faulkner, Bellow, Berryman, and Roethke. The purpose of this work is to illuminate their variations on the theme.