Sacrifice and Atonement in Toni Morrison's Beloved and William Faulkner's Light in August

Reading Beloved and Light in August in dialogue with New Testament intertexts and theological traditions of Christian atonement reveals the redemptive logic underlying Sethe’s infanticide and the exorcistic expulsion of Beloved, and the sacrificial logic underlying Joe Christmas’s lynching. Triangul...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Busch, Austin (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Johns Hopkins University Press 2024
In: Christianity & literature
Year: 2024, Volume: 73, Issue: 2, Pages: 229-259
IxTheo Classification:CB Christian life; spirituality
CD Christianity and Culture
HC New Testament
KAJ Church history 1914-; recent history
NBF Christology
NBK Soteriology
Further subjects:B Christ figures
B lynching (in literature)
B violence (in literature)
B Sacrifice
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Summary:Reading Beloved and Light in August in dialogue with New Testament intertexts and theological traditions of Christian atonement reveals the redemptive logic underlying Sethe’s infanticide and the exorcistic expulsion of Beloved, and the sacrificial logic underlying Joe Christmas’s lynching. Triangulating these and related scenes of racialized violence against models of sacrifice drawn from Girard, Freud, and other theorists discloses the novels’ critique of certain Christian theological interpretations of Jesus’s death that imply the self-perpetuating futility of surrogate sacrifice. This article considers the ideological purposes those assessments play in the historical-cultural contexts the novels imagine and in which they written.
ISSN:2056-5666
Contains:Enthalten in: Christianity & literature
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1353/chy.2024.a930542