In this dissertation I examine how three contemporary writers represent their religious experience and interpret the varied landscape of American Christianity. Central to my study is the consideration of contemporary religious discourse and how spiritual meanings are constructed and reflected in personal narratives by spatial structures and codes. Some of the questions that I focus on include: What and whom do the representations of religious life center around? Who's there? Who's not? Also, how important is the physical landscape in the rendering of spiritual experiences? What spaces and places are sacred? In chapter one I discuss why it is important for literary and composition scholars to consider contemporary religious writings. I also overview numerous theories of space, and point out how attending to the discourses of space helps elucidate the incarnational motif that is as strong a paradigm within contemporary Christian narratives as that of conversion. Chapter two focuses on what is most likely Dillard's best known work, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I explore in detail the ways in which she presents the landscape of the creek as both a natural playground and a spiritual wonderland. In chapter three, I consider four of Dillard's "churchscapes" that appear in Holy the Firm and Teaching a Stone to Talk. I argue that Dillard's "map" of the American church reveals a variegated Christian landscape and highlights clashes of incongruities. Dillard provides candid and occasionally humorous portraits of religious cultures as she attempts to make the sacred realm recognizable in her texts. In chapter four, I look at Norris's Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. I first establish how she represents her external landscape before engaging questions of how her spiritual views and her natural surroundings mutually shape each other. What most strongly gets expressed in Norris's essays is a vision of the sacred that is grounded within ordinary time and space and intensely human centered. In chapter five, I discuss Buechner's three spiritual autobiographies, Sacred Journey, Now and Then, and Telling Secrets. I detail how place imagery assists him to describe his internal life; via the landscape of his imagination, he drafts a blueprint not only for himself but for Christianity in North America as well. I argue that by naming his everyday, ordinary world as a regular venue of sacred encounter, Buechner's works both demystify the holy and reintroduce elements of enchantment into postmodern American spaces. I conclude with a brief afterword, drawing together some of the key ideas that appear in each chapter. I consider how differently these writers articulate their Christianity as well as, surprisingly, how many similar tropes and concerns appear in their personal narratives of faith.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of English, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 6, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-10, Section: A, page: 3862. Advisers: Deidre Lynch; Nicholas Williams.

"Girlhood Geographies: Mapping Gendered Spaces in Victorian Literature for Children," analyzes Victorian literature for girls and contemporary discourses on girlhood through the lens of cultural geography in order to examine the importance of place in the Victorian girl's identity work and negotiation of social responsibilities, pressures, and anxieties. The premise of my project is that one of the pressing cultural concerns in Victorian England, which greatly valued the stability of gender and class identities, was to teach children to know their place—not simply their proper position in society but how their position in society dictated the physical spaces in which they belonged and those in which they did not. Girls' virtue, in particular, was evinced in their ability to determine and engage in behavior appropriate to the spaces in which they lived. I argue that, by portraying girls' negotiation of the spaces of the home, outdoors, school, and street, Victorian children's literature sought to organize for the girl reader both the places in which she lived and her ability to define these places in relation to her own subjectivity. Each of my chapters considers a genre or body of children's literature that centers on place, including domestic fiction such as Charlotte Yonge's The Daisy Chain and Catherine Sinclair's Holiday House, literature set in the garden and outdoors, including Christina Rossetti's Speaking Likenesses and Kate Greenaway's Under the Window, and school stories by such writers as L.T. Meade, Geraldine Mockler, and Evelyn Sharp. In analyzing these texts, this dissertation illuminates the manner in which girl characters' relationships with nuanced physical spaces affect their negotiation of personal interests and social responsibilities, and their development into Victorian women.

Thesis (M.A.)--Victoria University of Wellington, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis deals with the reception of a German-language elucidarium in the Czech and subsequently Ukrainian literary environments. It acquaints the reader with the history of the work, which originates from the Latin theological tract Elucidarium by Honorius Augustodunensis from the end of the 11th century. It deals with the conception of the German Lucidarius, which was created as one of the first medieval works in the national language at the end of the 12th century and is considered to be the first German-language encyclopedia. This thesis presents the Lucidarius as an originally produced compilation created via the translation and adaptation of several Latin treatises from the fields of theology, philosophy, cosmology, geography, and history. In the Czech environment, Lucidář, translated from German, appears at the latest in the mid-15th century and is a work that enjoyed the interest of lower classes of readers until as late as the early 19th century. The Czech Lucidář carries significance in terms of inter-Slavic literary ties - via translation, a Croatian elucidarium (15th century) and Ukranian elucidarium (16th -17th century) were created. This thesis presents the Ukrainian Lucidarij as one of several works that was translated from Czech into the Ukrainian-Belarusian (or more precisely...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Full text release at OhioLINK's ETD Center delayed at author's request