Love and Good Reasons

Fritz Oehlschlaeger is Professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is coeditor of Toward the Making of Thoreau’s Modern Reputation, coauthor of Articulating the Elephant Man: Joseph Merrick and His Interpreters, and editor of Old Southwest Humor from the Saint Louis Reveille, 1844–1850.

• Acknowledgments ixIntroduction 11. Literary Criticism and Christian Ethics in Service to One Another 92. Toward a Christian Ethics of Reading, or, Why We Cannot Be Done with Bartleby 493. The "Best Blessing of Existence”: "Conscious Worth” in Emma 834. Honor, Faithfulness, and Community in Anthony Trollope’s The Warden and He Knew What Was Right 1265. The "Very Temple of Authorised Love”: Henry James and The Portrait of a Lady 1696. A Light That Has Been There from the Beginning: Stephen Crane and the Gospel of John 212Afterword: Postliberal Christian Scholarship: An Engagement with Rorty and Stout 251Notes 271Bibliography 297Index 307

"Fritz Oehlschlaeger shows that there really is something called a Christian knowledge that can make a difference for how one reads texts. Hopefully Love and Good Reasons will be read widely. I know of few accounts of reading that more enrich the discussion."-Stanley Hauerwas, author of The Hauerwas Reader "Fritz Oehlschlaeger’s postliberal approach offers a potential way beyond the impasse of the bifurcation of conservative and liberal in the cultural wars of contemporary literary criticism without asking participants to relinquish their deeply held ethical convictions."-Brian D. Ingraffia, author of Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology: Vanquishing God’s Shadow