Surpassing scholarly discourse surrounding the emergent secularism of the 19th century, Theology, Horror and Fiction argues that the Victorian Gothic is a genre fascinated with the immaterial. Through close readings of popular Gothic novels across the 19th century - Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Dracula and The Picture of Dorian Gray, among others - Jonathan Greenaway demonstrates that to understand and read Gothic novels is to be drawn into the discourses of theology. Despite the differences in time, place and context that informed the writers of these stories, the Gothic novel is irreducibly fascinated with religious and theological ideas, and this angle has been often overlooked in broader scholarly investigations into the intersections between literature and religion. Combining historical theological awareness with interventions into contemporary theology, particularly around imaginative apologetics and theology and the arts, Jonathan Greenaway offers the beginnings of a modern theology of the Gothic.
Author(s): Jonathan Greenaway
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Year: 2021
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Gothic and religion and theology
The absence of the theological in Gothic criticism
Outline of the argument: Chapter by chapter
Chapter 1: Monstrosity and the problem of evil: A theologico-literary understanding of personhood in Frankenstein and Paradise Lost
Chapter 2: ‘Sinners in the hands of an angry God’: Gothic revelation and monstrous theology in the Gothic’s Calvinist legacy
Chapter 3: Gothic writing and political theology: Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre as theological texts
Wuthering Heights, religious tensions, theology and grace
Jane Eyre as social theology
Chapter 4: ‘Through a glass darkly’: Reading the Victorian ghost story theologically
Chapter 5: The limitations of materialism: Fin-de-siècle Gothic, sin and subjectivity and the insufficiency of degeneration
Jekyll and Hyde – the law and the divided self: Fractured subjectivity and theology
Oscar Wilde, decadence, sin and The Picture of Dorian Gray
Dracula, iconography, sacramentality and purification
Conclusion: Through the Gothic castle, back to theology
Bibliography
Index
