Towards a Christian Poetics by Michael Edwards

by Michael Edwards

Book by Edwards, Michael

Genres: Christian

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

This is the disambiguation profile for otherwise unseparated works by authors publishing as Michael Edwards

See also@
Michael Edwards: wrote about perfumes & fragrances
Michael Edwards: GR Author
Michael Edwards: wrote short stories
Michael Edwards: Michael Aubrey Edwards (born Liverpool, England, 1957), wrote about civil society, philanthropy and social transformation
Michael Edwards: narrator
Michael Edwards: wrote about gardening
Michael Edwards: wrote about wine & champagne
Michael Edwards: Translator and Professor of Classics

Reviews

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was assigned reading in my Literary Theory class in college. I read only portions of it then, though the discussions of it made me put it on my reading list. Fourteen years later I finally attempted to read the whole thing.

This is a difficult, difficult book to read. Edwards is well read and widely read. I've not read much of anything he referenced in the book, and the book is largely an exposition of a variety of texts in light of his Christian dialectical reading of literature. So before attempting to read this for yourself, know that you're probably not going to get nearly as much out of the book as you'd hoped for.

There is some great stuff in here, it is just difficult mining for anyone that doesn't have a PhD in English Literature. I confess i skimmed most of this one. I didn't have the patience to slog through the whole thing.

Edwards' theory on dialectic is marvelous. From page 12:

“…if the biblical reading of life is in any way true, literature will be drawn strongly towards it. Eden, Fall, Transformation, in whatever guise will emerge in literature as everywhere else. The dynamics of a literary work will be likely to derive from the Pascalian interplays of greatness and wretchedness, of wretchedness and renewal, of renewal and persisting wretchedness.”

Another quote from much later in the book, page 173 describes this in better detail:

"We long for our world, because of its grandeur, and because it is the world we know and the only one in which we can imagine that we could be ourselves; we also long for a quite other world, 'no matter where, out of the world,' because of the world's misère."

Edwards thesis, is essentially that art--literature specifically, though he has a chapter on music and painting, is a God-given gift that calls us out of the fallen world into the transformed world-made-anew motif. Literature, and art in general, shows us the grandeur and wretchedness of life, but then shows us the possibilities of a remade world. Yet literature and art are unable to actually deliver on the promises of a remade world because that is reserved for God's "new heavens and new earth." This dialectical model is demonstrated in non-Christian art, as it is endemic to the human condition. We all long for what we were created for.

Again, this is great stuff, but unless you're an English Lit. PhD, and you attend to every word of this book, you'll feel a ragged, exhausted miner coming out of a cave with a diamond in your hand when you're done.

[Rod Zinkel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is not theological aestheticism, or a Christian approach to writing. It is, mainly, about how human language is fallen, as all of creation is fallen after the Fall, and how certain examples of literature reflect that, such as works of Shakespeare, Mallarme, and T.S. Eliot.

[Jeremy]

Friends of mine who have taken Luke Ferretter's theory course at Baylor University say that he really enjoyed (or at least used to enjoy) Edwards's work. I have a PDF of David Lyle Jeffrey's Religion and Literature review of Edwards's book. Donald Williams mentions it favorably in Ryken's The Christian Imagination (p. 15).