Background Reading List: The Literature of Spiritual Quest
Leigh, Michael, Secrets and Lies.
Please make suggestions: to "taylor@bc.edu"
Augustine, Confessions (400)
Grail romances 1300s
"I Sing of a Maiden" (1350?)
Donne, "At the Round Earth's Imagined Corners" (1633)
Herbert, 'Church Monuments' (1633), 'Love: III' (1633)
Blake, "The Little Black Boy" (1789), "The Chimney Sweeper" (1789),
"Holy Thursday" (1789) from Songs of Innocence; "Holy Thursday" (1794)
from Songs of Experience
Cowper, "The Castaway" (1799)
William Wordsworth, "The Solitary Reaper" (1805).
John Keats, letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 2/14/1819
. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)
Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (1843)
Arnold, "Dover Beach" (1851)
-----, "Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse" (1852)
John Henry Newman, 'on being a gentleman', from The Idea of the University
(1852)
John Stuart Mill, "A Crisis in my Mental History" from Aubtogiography
(1854)
Robert Browning, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" (1854)
Dickinson, "I'm 'wife'--I've finished that' (1860)
-----, "I dreaded that first Robin so" (1862)
-----, "A Thought went up my Mind today" (1863)
Newman, "Position of My Mind Since 1845", Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864)
Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Wreck of the Deutschland" (1875)
Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
Mrs. Humphry Ward, Robert Elsmere (1888)
William Butler Yeats, "The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland" (1892)
Henry James, "The Pupil" (1892)
Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul (1897)
Conrad, The Heart of Darkness (1899)
William Butler Yeats, "The Cold Heaven" (1912), "The Magi" (1914)
Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning" (1915)
Frost, "The Road Not Taken" (1916)
T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1914)
Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1920?)
T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land" (1917)
T. S. Eliot, "Sweeney among the Nighingales" (1919)
T. S. Eliot, "Dante", in The Sacred Wood (1920)
Rilke, poems on the Blessed Virgin (1920?)
D. H. Lawrence, "The Blind Man" (1922)
-----, "The Horse Dealer's Daughter" (1922)
Stevens, "The Emperor of Ice Cream" (1922)
Pound, Canto XIII (Confucius) (1925)
T. S. Eliot, "Journey of the Magi" (1927)
William Butler Yeats, "Among School Children" (1927) T. S. Eliot, "Ash
Wednesday" (1930)
Stevens, "The Idea of Order at Key West" (1934)
Stevens, "The Man on the Dump" (1938)
Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts" (1938)
Hemingway, "A Clean Well Lighted Place" (ca 1938?)
T. S. Eliot, "Four Quartets" (1935, 1940-2)
Robert Penn Warren, "Pure and Impure Poetry" (1943)
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1944)
Wallace Stevens, "The House was Quiet and the World Was Calm" (1945)
Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life (1942, 1981, 1983)
C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1943)
Robert Lowell, "After the Surprising Conversions" (1946)
-----, "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket" (1946)
Larkin, "Going" (1946)
F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (1948)
Larkin, "Deceptions" (1950)
Stevens, "To an Old Philosopher in Rome" (1952)
Stevens, "The World as Meditation" (1952)
Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1952)
Larkin, "Next Please" (1952)
-----, "Days" (1953)
O'Connor, "The River" (1953)
Larkin, "Places, Loved Ones" (1954)
Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (1954)
O'Connor, "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" (1954)
O'Connor, "The Displaced Person" (1954)
Larkin, "Church Going" (1954)
-----, "I Remember, I Remember" (1954)
O'Connor, "The Artificial Nigger" (1955)
Ingmar Bergman, "The Seventh Seal" (1956)
Barthes, Roland. "The Great Family of Man" in Mythologies (1957)
O'Connor, "The Enduring Chill" (1958)
Dinesen, "Babette's Feast" from Anecdotes of Destiny
(1958)
Larkin, "Faith Healing" (1960)
Ingmar Bergman, Through a Glass Darkly (1960).
O'Connor, "Everything That Rises Must Converge" (1961)
O'Connor, "The Lame Shall Enter First" (1962)
Larkin, "Ambulances" (1961)
Larkin, "Essential Beauty" (1962)
Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814 (1964)
O'Connor, "Revelation" (1964)
O'Connor, "Parker's Back" (1965)
J. Hillis Miller, "Poetry of Reality" in Poets of Reality (1965)
Rosemary Haughton, 'Creating Community' from The Transformation
of Man (1967)
Chaim Potok, The Chosen (1967)
Leonard Cohen, "Suzanne", from Selected Poems 1956-1968
Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author" in Image/Music/Text (1977)
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (1981).
André Gregory and Wally Shawn, My Dinner with André;
(1981).
Paul De Man, Blindness and Insight (1983)
Edward Said, "Conclusion: Religious Criticism" in The World, the Text,
and the Critic (1983)
Raymond Carver, "Cathedral" from Cathedral (1983)
Bob Franke, "For Real" (1986)
Jonathan Culler, "Comparative Literature and the Pieties", Profession
(1988)
Rod Macdonald, "White Buffalo" and "Water" from White
Buffalo (1988)
Eric Griffiths, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (1989).
Henry Jaglom, Eating (1990)
Sandra Cisneros, "Little Miracles, Kept Promises", from Woman
Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991)
Paul Giles, American Catholic Arts and Fictions (1992)
Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome (1994),
Frank Lentricchia, "Revisiting Mepkin Abbey", Edge of Night (1994)
Recent Reviews:
'Forms of Speech in Victorian Fiction by Raymond Chapman', review essay,
Victorian Studies 39 (1996) 412-15.
'Irene Collins's Jane Austen and the Clergy', Religion and the Arts
2 (1997), 145.
'Andrew Greeley Religion as Poetry', Religion and the Arts 2
(1997), 145-6.
'Donald Davie's Essays in Dissent; Church, Chapel, and the Unitarian
Conspiracy,' Religion and the Arts 1 (1996), 151.
'Kieran Quinlan's Walker Percy,' Religion and the Arts 1 (1996),
152.
'E. P. Thompson's Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the
Moral Law,' Religion and the Arts 1 (1997), 152-3.
'James Gibson's Thomas Hardy: A Literary Life", Thomas Hardy Journal
12 (Oct. 1996) 107-109.
Conference papers and talks:
"Introduction", and forum organizer: "In Search of a Critical Religious
Language", with Morris Dickstein, Robert Ryan, Kevin Hart, MLA Convention,
Toronto, December 25-30, 1997.
"Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and the Problem of a Literary/Religious
Language", Nineteenth Century Literature and Religion Conference,
Lancaster University, England, July 17-19, 1997.
"The Postmodern Synthesis of Etty Hillesum", MLA convention,
Dec. 29, 1996, Netherlandic Literature section.
Espousal Retreat Center:
Oct. 1996, "No Time for the Holy Spirit".
June 3, 1997, "Mercy and the Spiritual Life: On Faustina".
August 19, "Moral Crises and Thérèse's Elevator".
Bibliography of Some Previous Works Published: see Boston College
Libraries, select Quest, then FACP
Boston
College Libraries
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