A Poetics of Jesus

Throughout the 19th century, many would-be parents arose to "come to the help" of the "ill-treated and unfairly abused" central character of much 19th century fiction - Jesus. This study argues for a reading of key texts in the 19th century as an exercise in developing what the author, Jeffrey F. Keuss, has termed "a poetics of Jesus". Keuss reflects on the works of 18th and 19th century Anglo-German Higher Criticism and Victorian novelists and situate George Eliot as a writer who seeks to transfigure poetics as that which recovers what John Hick has termed a "language of love". The text discusses how the form within Christianity has chosen to work out its doctrine of the person of Christ is seen in early Christian poetics. Given the literary foundations of the Church from the New Testement onwards, a continued search for the essential form, content asnd structure of the person of Christ has been the very foundation of Christianity's self understanding. The text discusses Augustine and his view that since humanity is fashioned in the "imago dei" or image of God, the form of the subject-matter must be that of the form of God before then going on to assess the questions raised in the work of such writers as Schiller, Holderin, Goethe, and Hegel's concerns for the embodied "Geist" in relation to subjectivity. These authors are compared to Eliot and the ideas of the subject and the sacred in her work. Eliot's contemporaries, and their answer to the question of figuring Christ, is examined within both the 19th century fictional politics and also the theological work of F.C. Baur, Ludwig Feuerbach, and D.F. Strauss. The three short stories of Eliot's, collected together as "Scenes of Clerical Life" and "Adam Bede" are discussed with regard to her developing "poetics of Jesus" through iconographic signs that travel the visual-verbal route. The final chapter discusses Eliot's work "The Mill on the Floss" as the culminating point of her poetic formation in it's autobiographical quality.