The Calvinesque
An Aesthetics of Violence in English Literature after the Reformation
Published on 13. August 2014
Book
Hardback
176 pages
978-3-631-64331-0 (ISBN)
Description
This study deals with the aesthetic manifestations of one of the world's most fiercely iconophobic and anti-aesthetic religious cultures: Calvinism. It establishes the category of the Calvinesque as an aesthetic of extreme violence against the human body. In close readings of theological documents, literary texts and dramatic speeches, the book examines the extent to which language, literary imagination and theology permeate and condition each other. The book aims at providing new perspectives on literary stylistics after the religious turn in the humanities. By emphasising the pervasive impact of Protestant theology on secular Western culture and by radically questioning some of the narratives that have been crucial to Western (Protestant) identity, this study opens up historical perspectives to contemporary debates about the impact of Calvinism on political discourses, violent entertainment, disciplinary culture and an Anglo-American humanitarian «pornography of pain».
More details
Person
Claudia Richter studied English Literature and Religious Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, and English and Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh (UK). For her MA thesis, The Aesthetics of Violence in the Drama of Christopher Marlowe, she received the Martin Lehnert Award, which is annually awarded by the German Shakespeare Society. In the past, she has been a lecturer and a researcher at Freie Universität Berlin.
Content
Contents: Iconoclasm, Calvin, and Word-painting - Anti-Theatricality and the Imagination of Violence - Protestant Martyrdom - <<The Calvinesque>>: Literary and Dramatic Language - Psalm Translation after the Reformation - Calvinism, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama - The Rhetoric of Prophecy - The Iconography of God's Punishment: <<Braining>> - Calvinism and Histories of Violence in Europe: Karen Halttunen, Philip Gorski, Charles Taylor, Michel Foucault, Norbert Elias.