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Victorian Parables Dr Susan E. Colon

Victorian Parables By Dr Susan E. Colon

Victorian Parables by Dr Susan E. Colon


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Summary

Presents a critical study of the reinscription of biblical parables in Victorian realist fiction. The author shows that authors such as Charles Dickens, Margaret Oliphant, and Charlotte Yonge appreciated the power of parables to deliver an ethical charge that was as unexpected as it was disruptive to conventional moral complacency.

Victorian Parables Summary

Victorian Parables by Dr Susan E. Colon

This is a critical study of the reinscription of biblical parables in Victorian realist fiction. The familiar stories of the good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, and Lazarus and the Rich Man were part of the cultural currency in the nineteenth century, and Victorian authors drew upon the figures and plots of biblical parables for a variety of authoritative, interpretive, and subversive effects. However, scholars of parables in literature have often overlooked the 19th-century novel, assuming that realism - the fiction of the probable and the commonplace - bears no relation to the subversive, iconoclastic genre of parable. But the Victorian literary engagement with the parable genre was not merely a matter of the useful or telling allusion. Susan E. Colon shows that authors such as Charles Dickens, Margaret Oliphant, and Charlotte Yonge appreciated the power of parables to deliver an ethical charge that was as unexpected as it was disruptive to conventional moral complacency. Against the common assumption that the genres of realism and parable are polar opposites, this study explores how Victorian novels, despite their length, verisimilitude, and multi-plot complexity, can become parables in ways that imitate, interpret, and challenge their biblical sources. This series aims to showcase new work at the forefront of religion and literature through short studies written by leading and rising scholars in the field. Books will pursue a variety of theoretical approaches as they engage with writing from different religious and literary traditions. Collectively, the series will offer a timely critical intervention to the interdisciplinary crossover between religion and literature, speaking to wider contemporary interests and mapping out new directions for the field in the early twenty-first century.

Victorian Parables Reviews

'Victorian Parables applies theories of biblical hermeneutics to historically contextualized readings of Victorian novels in a clear, fresh and provocative way which overcomes conventional critical dichotomies opposing religious belief and novelistic realism. Colon's book represents a significant contribution to the post-secular interpretation of Victorian culture.' -- Dr Gavin Budge, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Hertfordshire, UK
Susan Colon offers an original and highly accessible account of the way in which these subversive gospel stories worked at an ethical level to challenge the reading practices of Victorian readers. She provides equally assured guidance both through theoretical issues and in exemplary readings of works by Charlotte Yonge, Margaret Oliphant and Charles Dickens. -- Professor Elisabeth Jay, Associate Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities, Oxford Brookes University, UK
This is a very satisfying book indeed.So much that other scholars do not see or get wrong Susan E. Colon observes and gets right.Victorian Parables not only offers insightful readings of Charlotte Yonge, Margaret Oliphant, and Charles Dickens, it defines and illuminates the genre of parables in a way that it would do literary scholars, theologians, and students of the Bible well simply to follow with humility and gratitude. -- Timothy Larsen, McManis Professor of Christian Thought, Wheaton College, Illinois, USA
In this modest, concise, illuminating study, Colon (Baylor Univ.) looks at the ways in which the subversinve narrative techniques and challenging ethical content of biblical parables enrich the writings of Charlotte Yonge, Margaret Oliphant, and Charles Dickens. Colon's style is clear, eloquent, theoretically engaged, yet entirely jargon free. Her readings of Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe, Oliphant's The Perpetual Curate, and Dickens's Our Mutual Friend are original and will be very useful for scholars of those three writers. This is a very interesting and useful book. Summing up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. -- J.W. Vail, Boston University, College of General Studies * Choice *

About Dr Susan E. Colon

Susan E. Colon is Associate Professor of Literature at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, USA. She is the author of The Professional Ideal in the Victorian Novel: The Works of Trollope, Disraeli, George Eliot, and Gaskell (Palgrave, 2007).

Table of Contents

1. Parables and Literature; 2. Parables and Nineteenth-Century Literary History; 3. Realism and Parable in Charlotte Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe; 4. Prodigals and Pharisees: Waywardness in Oliphant's The Perpetual Curate; 5. The Agent of a Superior: Stewardship Parables in Our Mutual Friend; References; Index.

Additional information

NPB9780826443489
9780826443489
0826443486
Victorian Parables by Dr Susan E. Colon
New
Hardback
Continuum Publishing Corporation
2012-02-09
176
N/A
Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
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