Robert Pollok's The Course of Time and Literary Theodicy in the Romantic Age: The Rise and Fall of a Christian Epic Deryl Davis 9781032523101

* This book is the first (and only) comprehensive study of Robert Pollok's bestselling epic The Course of Time undertaken in the modern era.

* The book breaks ground in exploring the reasons for the poem's immense popularity in the first half of the nineteenth century and its precipitious decline thereafter.

* The book sheds new light on nineteenth-century debates about the relationship between religion and literature and the uses of literature as a vehicle for theological expression.

* In exploring the poem's reception history, the book offers new insights into the relationship between religion and wider culture and religion and secularization in nineteenth-century Britain and America.

* The study affirms the important, but often overlooked, role that religion played in Scottish Romantic literature.

* The study looks at Robert Pollok's The Course of Time as a case study for the importance of religion in Scottish Romantic literature and the role that literature played in the struggle between religion and secularism.

Deryl Davis is Adjunct Professor of Theology and the Arts at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., and a producer with Journey Films, a documentary film company making films on religion and spirituality for public television. He received his Ph.D. in Literature, Theology, and the Arts from the University of Glasgow, Scotland.

The Course of Time was one of the most popular poems in the century after its publication. But in twentieth-century criticism, it almost entirely disappeared. Deryl Davis's ground-breaking book, the first to focus on the poem, explains why it once mattered - and why it should matter more today.

Crawford Gribben, Professor of History, Queen's University Belfast

Now almost forgotten, Robert Pollok's The Course of Time (1827) was an enormously influential best seller in its day, sometimes compared to Milton's Paradise Lost. Deryl Davis' new book examines its importance within Scottish Romanticism and the theology and literature of its time and why it was forgotten later in the nineteenth century. Davis' work makes an important contribution to the field of Romanticism and to the religious and literary world of early nineteenth-century Scotland.

David Jasper, Emeritus Professor, Literature and Theology, University of Glasgow

This is a culturally sensitive reassessment of one the big poetic texts in Scotland and well beyond during the early nineteenth century. Discarded and forgotten but now disinterred, Pollok and The Course of Time have much that is worth pondering for a readership interested in literature and theology in the twenty-first century.

Gerard Carruthers, Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow