The Poetics of Belief

Studies in Coleridge, Arnold, Pater, Santayana, Stevens, and Heidegger

By Nathan A. Scott Jr.

The Poetics of Belief

208 pp., 6 x 9

  • Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-9776-8
    Published: January 2011

Studies in Religion

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Scott continues his examination of modernism -- not in its skeptical, iconoclastic dissentient phase -- by tracing out a line of thought that accords the poetic imagination an essentially constructive role in the formation of fundamental beliefs. Occasionally, the entire line of thought is considered in relation to contemporary structuralist and postructuralist ideologies that have undertaken to convert the very idea of the imagination into something unreclaimably problematic.

Originally published in 1985.

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Reviews

"A stunning work. . . . [This] is at once an essay in cultural history, a study in critical theory, and a monograph on the modern philosophy of religion. Its importance lies not only in the originality of its interpretations of figures as diverse as Coleridge, Arnold, Pater, and Santayana, but in the manner in which it isolates a central and centralizing concern shared by each in the poetic, epistemological, and metaphysical import of the imagination."--Giles B. Gunn, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill