The Fantastic in English Devotional Literature

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course challenges perceptions that devotional literature in English is dry, conventional, or trite. The texts we will read show the huge diversity of literary approaches to God and the gods, prayer, and the human quest for meaning in the universe in the Christian era in England. We will read texts in which trees talk, dreamers travel to other worlds, and fairy tales and exotic myths break into the familiar and real. We will look at texts from the very beginnings of English literature (c. AD 650) all the way to fantastic writers like T.S. Eliot, G.K. Chesterton, and J.R.R. Tolkien in the 20th century. All texts in other languages than modern English will be read in translation.