The Poetics of Transubstantiation

From Theology to Metaphor

Douglas Burnham, Enrico Giaccherini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138250918
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351884112
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The essays in this collection explore the concept of 'transubstantiation', its adaptations and transformations in English and European culture from the Elizabethans to the twentieth century. Favoring an interartistic and comparative perspective, a wide range of critical approaches, from the philosophical to the semiological, from cultural materialism to gender and queer studies, are brought to bear on authors ranging from Descartes, Shakespeare and Joyce, to Macpherson, Madox Ford, and Winterson, as well as on contemporary sculpture and an Italian adaptation of Conrad for the screen in an unusually comic vein. The volume, edited by Douglas Burnham of Staffordshire University and by Enrico Giaccherini of Pisa University, will be of interest to those concerned with the cultural history of Christianity and with the remarkable critical and theoretical insights generated by contemporary approaches to this traditional theme.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• General Editors’ Preface
• Editors’ Foreword
• 1 The Riddle of Transubstantiation
• 2 Real Accidents, Surfaces and Digestions
• 3 The Transubstantial Bard
• 4 Transubstantiating the Performance
• 5 Transubstantiating Love
• 6 A ‘Deformed’ Christianity
• 7 From Substantial Body into Evanescent Ghost
• 8 Shakespeare as Paraclitus
• 9 Food for the Soul
• 10 Reformations
• 11 Lost in Translation
• 12 Conrad and Scola
• 13 RSC 1999: Enter Guilt on the Stage of Conscience
• 14 Embodying the Past
• 15 Sculptural Transubstantiations
• Bibliography
• Index