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The New Voice
Religion, Literature, Hermeneutics
Amos Wilder Library
Foreword by Peter S. Hawkins
Imprint: Wipf and Stock
270 Pages, 5.50 x 8.50 x 0.50 in
- Paperback
- 9781625645043
- Published: December 2013
$35.00 / £31.00 / AU$47.00
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In The New Voice, Amos Wilder carries forward and combines two areas of activity represented in his earlier, groundbreaking publications. One of these is that of the theological critic, concerned with modern literature as it illuminates the quests of our age and the vicissitudes of our religious tradition, as found in his Modern Poetry and the Christian Tradition and Theology and Modern Literature. The other area is that of biblical scholarship, especially in its recent concern with hermeneutics and the modes of language, as represented by his volume on early Christian rhetoric, The Language of the Gospel.
Wilder seeks in the present book to deepen and correct the approach of the theological critic by urging that rhetorical criteria should receive primary attention and that language should be explored in new ways. Wilder therefore examines certain aspects of biblical genre and style as ways of illuminating modern rhetoric and its underlying assumptions. It is a main theme of the work that the disorders and travail of our time should be construed in a positive light, and that the most significant writing of the period not only illuminates contemporary reality but fashions a language in which the abiding legacies and archetypes of the past can again be brought to speech.
Writers specially discussed in the book range from Musil, Proust, Eliot, and Gide to Sartre, Perse, Beckett, Lowell, David Jones, and the exponents of open verse. The work of many others is brought into relation with the task defined by Pound as naming things accurately and by Stevens as "making the bread of faithful speech."
Amos N. Wilder (1895-1993), New Testament scholar, poet, literary critic, and clergyman, received all earned degrees from Yale. His teaching career included posts at Andover Newton Theological School, Chicago Theological Seminary and the University of Chicago, and Harvard Divinity School. Special honors included the Golden Rose of the New England Poetry Club (1943) and the Bross Prize (1952). Wilder also received the Croix de guerre for service in World War I. He was the brother of playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder.
"Here is a book that, in Spinoza's words, is as excellent as it is rare. The beginning student may be set to work on it in full confidence that everything important in the recent history of it's subject matter has been deftly tracked, while the scholar will find that the author has blazed promising paths into the future. Indeed the most significant mark of Professor Wilder's work is that he does not merely relate the disciplines noted in the sub-title in their contemporary form; rather he makes substantive contribution to each, and so sets their alliances on a new plane. Thus in theology he tills the sub-soil of tradition, or what he calls the "wholeness of the canon"; in literature he probes modern anomie in conjunction with the quest for universal patterns of narrative and fabulation; and in hermeneutics he proliferates the essential linguisticality of human existence into a comparative rhetoric. As regards these concerns and their inner relation, it is a thing of joy and beauty that an elder tongue should continue to find a new voice."
--Ray L. Hart, Chairman of the Department of Religious Studies, University of Montana