Dr Alison Searle

Honorary Associate
PhD BA (Hons) Sydney
a.a.searle@gmail.com

Early Modern Literature and Culture

Seventeenth-century British literature; trans-Atlantic Puritan literary traditions; twentieth-century fantasy; theories of the imagination; the relationship between literature and theology; and the epistolary genre.

The culture of epistolarity amongst British Puritans and Dissenters, focusing particularly on the manuscript correspondence of Richard Baxter (1615-91).

‘Narrative, Metaphor and Myth in C. S. Lewis’s testimonial novel Till We Have Faces’ in Oral and Written Narratives and Cultural Identities: Interdisciplinary Approaches, eds., F. C. Fagundes and I. M. F. Blayer (New York: Peter Lang, forthcoming 2007).

‘Tolkien and Time: The Fantastic Art of Consolation, Endurance, Escape’, in Art and Time eds., Jan Lloyd et al., (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, forthcoming 2007).

‘The Role of Missions in Things Fall Apart and Nervous Conditions’, Literature and Theology 21.1 (2007).

‘The Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits: Richard Baxter’s Prophetic Voice,’ The Glass, No. 19 (2007).

‘Fantastical Fact, Home or Other? The Imagined ‘Medieval’ in C. S. Lewis’ in Mythlore: A Journal of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature, 25.3-4 (2007).

‘The Moral Imagination: Biblical Imperatives, Narrative and Hermeneutics in Pride and Prejudice’ in Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 59.1 (2006).

‘‘An Idolatrous Imagination? Biblical Theology and Romanticism in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre’ in Christianity and Literature 56.1 (2006).

‘My Souls Anatomiste’: Richard Baxter, Katherine Gell and Letters of the Heart’ in Early Modern Literary Studies, 12.2 (2006).

‘Breviate of the Life of Margaret,’ The Literary Encyclopedia, 2006.

‘Gildas Salvianus,’ The Literary Encyclopedia, 2006.

‘The Saints Everlasting Rest,’ The Literary Encyclopedia, 2006.

‘The Biblical and Imaginative ‘Interiority’ of Samuel Rutherford,’ Dalhousie Review 85.2 (2005).

‘Theology, Genre and Romance in Richard Baxter and Harriet Beecher Stowe,’ Religion and Literature 37.1 (2005).

‘Biblical Aesthetics and the Pilgrim’s Progress,’ Journal of Literature and Aesthetics 14.2 (2004).

‘Which Model? Whose Measure?: Sexuality, Morality and Power in Measure for Measure and Basilicon Doron,’ Philament 1.1 (2003).

I have also reviewed books for the Journal of Religious History, Early Modern Literary Studies, Philament and The Glass.