In an attempt to introduce Wirkungsgeschichte, reception history and reception theory, this article begins by considering the different histories each term carries. Although each term signals something slightly different, their collective effect is to raise questions about the historical-critical method that continues to dominate New Testament studies. The main focus of the article is Gadamer’s idea of Wirkungsgeschichte, a term that has, for good reason, been read in various ways by New Testament scholars. Acknowledging that different readings of the term exist, I turn to Gadamer’s broader thesis in Truth and Method and suggest that the purpose of Wirkungsgeschichte is to enable an interpretative conversation rather than to define a new scientific methodology.
Over the last thirty years or so, sensation fiction has shaken off its scandalous roots to become a respectable area of academic study. The transformation began with the publication of Winifred Hughes's The Maniac in the Cellar (1980) and Patrick Brantlinger's “What Is ‘Sensational’ about the ‘Sensation Novel’?” (1982), and gathered pace in the 1980s and 90s through the contributions of Ann Cvetkovich, Pamela Gilbert, D. A. Miller, Lyn Pykett, and Jenny Bourne Taylor. One of the results of all this scholarly interest is that the genre has begun to attract more introductory works that concentrate on consolidating what others have said. Ideas that were once considered new or controversial are now seen as common knowledge: we know that sensation fiction involves more than the influential novels written in the 1860s by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins; we are familiar with the frequent blurring between sensation fiction and other genres (including crime fiction and the gothic); we are well schooled in interdisciplinary approaches that read sensation fiction alongside science, psychology, and law; and we are used to competing claims for sensation fiction as a subversive or conservative genre. With so much attention being given to a collection of writings once described by Hughes as “irretrievably minor” (167) and by Brantlinger as “a minor subgenre of British fiction” (1), one could be forgiven for thinking that there are few secrets left to be uncovered. Yet, as the wide array of books considered here attests, the critical appeal of sensation fiction and Victorian crime shows no sign of abating. If anything, the first few years of the twenty-first century have seen even greater levels of interest: a number of Victorian Studies conferences have chosen sensation as their theme, and the genre features regularly in the pages of academic journals. Given that the extent of our ongoing fascination would probably have shocked a previous generation of scholars, this review of recent critical trends will try and figure out why the genre possesses such a powerful hold on our thinking and whether or not this hold is likely to continue.
Summer Seminar for faculty, titled "Postsecular Studies and the Rise of the English Novel, 1719-1897." The germ of our seminar was simple. We are scholars who work on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century British literature, and we edit monograph series in religion, literature, and postsecular studies. In our experience, scholars in our fields have yet to take up the insights of postsecular scholarship in meaningful ways. By and large, their stories still cast the novel as the handmaid of secularization, reworking the well-worn plot of religion's decline rather than of its complex transformation and shape-shifting nature in modernity. We wanted to lead a seminar that gave faculty a chance to read postsecular scholarship from many disciplines alongside canonical and lesser-well-known novels from Robinson Crusoe to Dracula, tuning our ears to hear other possibilities about the migrations of religion and secularism in these narratives. The term "postsecular" continues to be used in a variety of ways that are important to distinguish. In Post-Secular Philosophy (1998) Philip Blond used it to describe a "Radical Orthodox" theological orientation. For Jürgen Habermas the postsecular is a political designation for a European society no longer homogenously secular and grappling to integrate religious citizens in the public sphere. For scholars in our discipline, it is often a literary-historical term borrowed from John McClure's Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (2007), identifying select post-WWII literature more occupied with faith and spirituality than the modernist fiction that preceded it. In framing our seminar, we used the term "postsecular" primarily in a fourth sense, as shorthand for
A number of critics have noted the lack of attention given to the Cross in G. K. Chesterton's writings. Stratford Caldecott, for example, writes: "Compared to his remarks on Christmas, Chesterton's comments on Easter-the Passion and the Resurrection-occupy little space" (474). If this is so, then one must reflect further on how Chesterton's apparent neglect ofthe Cross can be reconciled with the general perception of him as an orthodox Christian theologian.' Before I consider the role of the Cross within Chesterton's theological schema, it is apposite to examine what Chesterton has to say about the Cross. In doing so, one must distinguish between the various ways in which theologians have interpreted its significance. Chesterton considers four different interpretations in his writings: the way in which the Cross symbolizes the linearity of human history, the idea that it marks the ultimate triumph of suffering, its connection to the doctrine of the Atonement, and the suggestion that it describes a God who suffers.In the opening chapter of The Ball and the Cross, Michael and Professor Lucifer engage one another in a philosophical discussion. As far as Professor Lucifer is concerned, their opposing philosophies are symbolized by the cross and the ball they see on top of St. Paul's Cathedral: "What could possibly express your philosophy and my philosophy better than the shape of that cross and the shape of that ball?" (12). While the former represents the linearity of the Christian faith, the latter signifies a cyclical view of life. In The Everlasting Man Chesterton elaborated further, distinguishing the Cross from not only the cyclical wheel of Eastern religions but also the Hegelian idealism of his own day:The cross has become something more than a historical memory; it does convey, almost as by a mathematical diagram, the truth about the real point at issue; the idea of a conflict stretching outwards into eternity. It is true, and even tautological, to say that the cross is the crux of the whole matter.In other words the cross, in fact as well as figure, does really 485
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