Toward a Sacramental Poetics

Regina M. Schwartz is professor of English and law at Northwestern University. She is the author and editor of numerous books, including Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism.Patrick J. McGrath is associate professor of English at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is the author of Early Modern Asceticism: Literature, Religion, and Austerity in the English Renaissance.

• Introduction 1. Cloven Tongues: Theology and the Translation of the Scriptures2. "Those are pearls": Transformation, Translation and Exchange3. How to Write Like God: Dante and Sacramental Poetics4. Sacramental Poetics and Quasi-Sacramentals5. The Sacramental Dilation of Richard Hooker6. The Miracle of the Eucharist and the Mysticism of the Political Body7. Doubling Metaphysics8. Verbum efficax: The Theopoetics of Real Presence9. Dracula's Sacramental Prosaics and the Remains of Religion in Modernity10. The Franciscan Hearts of Hopkins and Merton

"It is impossible to read Milton, Shakespeare, or Jonson the same way after the insightful literary analyses in Toward a Sacramental Poetics." —Ilha do Desterro"Toward a Sacramental Poetics offers a compelling invitation to recognize the inexhaustible depths of meaning available in a sacramental vision of reality. Such depths of meaning embrace the poetic in its broadest artistic, epistemological, and communal dimensions. The essays gathered here are a wonderful expression of the depths of communal meaning to which the volume points." —Vittorio Montemaggi, co-editor of Dante, Mercy, and the Beauty of the Human Person"In this brilliant and wonderfully arresting set of responses to Regina Schwartz's important work Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism, an eminent group of contributors helps us think about the capacity of signs to point beyond themselves in our modern secular world." —Mark Knight, editor of The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion