The Poetics of Transubstantiation: From Theology to Metaphor

by Burnham,Douglas

• ISBN13: 9780754650263
• ISBN10: 075465026X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-02-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

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

General Editors' Preface	vii
Editors' Foreword	viii
Notes on Contributors	xii
1 The Riddle of Transubstantiation	1	(10)
Douglas Burnham
2 Real Accidents, Surfaces and Digestions: Descartes and the 'very easily explained' Transubstantiation	11	(15)
Tomaso Cavallo
3 The Transubstantial Bard: Shakespeare and Catholicism	26	(18)
Michael Davies
4 Transubstantiating the Performance: Towards a Mimetic Narrative in Hamlet's Hecuba Scene	44	(11)
Silvia Bigliazzi
5 Transubstantiating Love: John Donne and Cultural Criticism	55	(8)
Andy Mousley
6 A 'Deformed' Christianity: Ethical Transubstantiation in English Reformation Plays	63	(12)
Nicoletta Caputo
7 From Substantial Body into Evanescent Ghost: the World of James Macpherson's Ossianic 'Fragments'	75	(13)
Laura Giovannelli
8 Shakespeare as Paraclitus: Transubstantiation in Joyce and T.S. Eliot	88	(7)
Francesco Gozzi
9 Food for the Soul: Reading Mrs Ramsay's Boeuf en Daube	95	(9)
Catherine Burgass
10 Reformations: Ford Madox Ford and Transubstantiation	104	(14)
Martin Stannard
11 Lost in Translation: Gender and the Figure of the Translator in Contemporary Queer Fiction	118	(8)
Emma Parker
12 Conrad and Scola: Transposing the Heart of Darkness into Film	126	(11)
Mario Curreli
13 RSC 1999: Enter Guilt on the Stage of Conscience: The Family Reunion by T.S. Eliot	137	(13)
Carla Dente
14 Embodying the Past: Vocal Transubstantiation in Erri De Luca's Tu, mio	150	(12)
Marina Spunta
15 Sculptural Transubstantiations: Reflections upon Wax, Flesh and Stone, Blood, Bread and Bone	162	(10)
Alison Yarrington
Bibliography	172	(7)
Index	179