Exploring Worldviews in Literature: From William Wordsworth to Edward Albee

In Exploring Worldviews in Literature, author Laura Barge brings together a collection of essays to help readers effectively engage literature as she practices different strategies of literary criticism from a Christian perspective. She embraces Jaroslav Pelikan s claim that the university remains the custodian of the common memory of any culture and thus cannot escape the obligation to preserve the moral and spiritual history of that culture. The literature Barge analyzes here comes from a wide spectrum of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature in the British, American, and Russian canons. Throughout the volume, Barge explores numinous spaces, models of scapegoats, disclosures of the sacred in nature, and the mythos of an absent God, all in an effort to enlighten by unfolding worldviews.

Because the study of literature is [so] closely connected with the experiences of life itself, Barge writes, it is also [particularly] in need of the enlightenment of Christian truth. In each of these essays, Barge draws on her years of study and her honest convictions to offer readers models of how to better understand the relationship between texts and Christian life.