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9781501371349

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Marilynne Robinson, Theologian of the Ordinary demonstrates the theological richness of Robinson's fiction and highlights its theological potential. Cunning charts new directions in Robinson studies for the imaginative to enliven the theological, to their mutual enrichment. * Religious Studies and Theology * Cunning's wonderfully attentive and illuminating readings of Robinson's novels represent a key contribution to our understanding of her work as a theology of the exceptional ordinary. * David Coughlan, Lecturer in English, University of Limerick, Ireland, and author of Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction (2016) * Marilynne Robinson is a rare writer, one who combines an astringent and dazzling intellectual precision with deep compassion and a hard won belief in hope. In Andrew Cunning's book she receives the kind of critical reading that her work deserves: alert, attentive and attuned to the ways in which her theology of the everyday, and especially the drama of grace, is at play in everything that she writes. This is a fine study that does justice to its subject and makes an excellent contribution to the fields of American literature and religious studies. * Andrew Tate, Reader in Literature, Religion and Aesthetics, Lancaster University, UK, and author of Apocalyptic Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2017) * Like the lake which features so significantly in Marilynne Robinson's first novel, her fiction combines a level, luminous surface with a depth of disturbed and elusive memory. Andrew Cunning helps us see a bit further into that depth, into the bewildering strangeness of the 'ordinary' - mapping out Robinson's continuities with 19th-century American literary and philosophical themes, illuminating what she thinks about language, narrative, selfhood and myth, and pursuing her subtle and many-sided engagement with the Calvinist tradition. It is a careful, intelligent, original book, a really significant contribution to the understanding of this remarkable thinker and storyteller. * Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury *

Cunning's wonderfully attentive and illuminating readings of Robinson's novels represent a key contribution to our understanding of her work as a theology of the exceptional ordinary. * David Coughlan, Lecturer in English, University of Limerick, Ireland, and author of Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction (2016) * Marilynne Robinson is a rare writer, one who combines an astringent and dazzling intellectual precision with deep compassion and a hard won belief in hope. In Andrew Cunning's book she receives the kind of critical reading that her work deserves: alert, attentive and attuned to the ways in which her theology of the everyday, and especially the drama of grace, is at play in everything that she writes. This is a fine study that does justice to its subject and makes an excellent contribution to the fields of American literature and religious studies. * Andrew Tate, Reader in Literature, Religion and Aesthetics, Lancaster University, UK, and author of Apocalyptic Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2017) * Like the lake which features so significantly in Marilynne Robinson's first novel, her fiction combines a level, luminous surface with a depth of disturbed and elusive memory. Andrew Cunning helps us see a bit further into that depth, into the bewildering strangeness of the 'ordinary' - mapping out Robinson's continuities with 19th-century American literary and philosophical themes, illuminating what she thinks about language, narrative, selfhood and myth, and pursuing her subtle and many-sided engagement with the Calvinist tradition. It is a careful, intelligent, original book, a really significant contribution to the understanding of this remarkable thinker and storyteller. * Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury *

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Andrew Cunning is a theologian and writer in Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK. He has taught at Queen's University Belfast and the University of Limerick.

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