British Literature and Spirituality

British Literature and Spirituality reflects the current state of research in the field of spiritual literature, where spirituality is understood as a culturally-determined universal phenomenon or facticity of humanity consisting in the living apprehension of the Sacred during rare gratuitous moments of illumination. Gathering fourteen critical essays by scholars working in various disciplines (English studies, music, the arts, psychology, theology), this book explores a corpus of encoded narratives of, as well as reflections on, the Sacred in British literature from the Late Middle Ages to the present. Pluridisciplinary in nature and interdisciplinary in method, British Literature and Spirituality illustrates the hermeneutic potential of readings that transcend the disciplinary boundaries of spiritual writings.

John S. Bak is Professor of American Literature at the Univ. of Lorraine (formerly Nancy-2), and director of the interdisciplinary research centre I.D.E.A. (Interdisciplinarite dans les etudes anglophone), Nancy.

Franz K. Wöhrer is associate professor of English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. He has specialized in the cross-cultural and psycho-phenomenological study of mystical literature.