Consolation – literary and religious perspectives

Recent Submissions

  • Shared Experience – Shared Consolation? Fictional Perspective-Taking and Existential Stances in Literature 

    Petterson, Torsten (LIR. journal, 2015)
    This paper suggests some ways in which the concerns of existential psychotherapy may be combined with the practice of poetry therapy. It emphasizes the capacity of literature for inducing perspective-taking, i.e. the ...
  • The Consolation of Pirandello’s Green Blanket and an Autistic Theology 

    Dunster, Ruth (LIR. journal, 2015)
    Luigi Pirandello’s 1926 novel One, No One and One Hundred Thousand depicts its protagonist Vitangelo Moscarda as a troubled, introspective searcher for reality. Moscarda finds ultimate salvation though a mystical ...
  • The Consolation of Things: Domestic Objects in H.D.’s Writing from the Second World War 

    Anderson, Elizabeth (LIR. journal, 2015)
    This paper analyses the spiritual consolation of domestic objects – Christmas decorations, food, flowers – in the writing of the American writer H.D. The paper asks how H.D.’s engagement with crafting material things ...
  • A Quantum of Solace and Heap of Doubt 

    Reinhold Bråkenhielm, Carl (LIR. journal, 2015)
    The article examines two lines of reasoning for consolation on the basis of a religious belief about life after death. The first line departs from the presumed consoling power of such a belief (summarized in the ...
  • The Consolation of Everyday Things 

    Walton, Heather (LIR. journal, 2015)
    This article begins by outlining some of the ways in which objects have been understood to have consolatory functions in Western culture. It then explores how a recent shift in thinking about things is emerging both ...
  • On the Deathbed: Margaret Cavendish on What to Say in Times of Grief 

    Rosengren, Cecilia (LIR. journal, 2015)
    The article highlights a couple of fictitious speeches of dying persons, written by the 17th century philosopher, dramatist and author Margaret Cavendish. The speeches are included in her book Orations of Divers Sorts, ...
  • Consolation as Graced Encounters with Ignatius of Loyola and Hélène Cixous 

    Reek, Jennifer (LIR. journal, 2015)
    This article suggests that the sixteenth-century Basque saint Ignatius of Loyola and the French thinker Hélène Cixous experienced consolation in unexpected encounters with texts. For Ignatius, consolation came as a ...
  • Consolation and Empathy in the Religious Worldview of Tomas Tranströmer 

    Olofsson, Staffan (LIR. journal, 2015)
    The poems of the Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer has an introspective quality which alternates intangible between things and events from the exterior world and events from man’s inner life. He constantly delves on what ...
  • Stoicism and Consolation 

    Lindberg, Bo (LIR. journal, 2015)
    In this essay, Stoic consolation is presented by help of Seneca and his treatises on consolation addressed to two women, his mother Helvia and his relative Marcia. Consolation according to Seneca consists in arguments ...
  • Consolation in Christian Heinrich Postel’s Biblical Opera Libretto 

    Hedman, Dag (LIR. journal, 2015)
    This essay discusses the prominence of the consolation theme in Christian Heinrich Postel’s biblical opera libretto Cain und Abel Oder Der verzweifelnde Bruder=Mörder (Hamburg, 1689). It is shown that in this drama the ...
  • Consolation and Psychoanalysis 

    Johansson, Per Magnus (LIR. journal, 2015)
    Psychoanalysis has seldom concerned itself with the notion of consolation at the theoretical level. Consolation (or comfort or solace) is not a psychoanalytic concept. Freud only uses the word once in his general ...
  • Consolations of a New Earth 

    Cavallin, Clemens (LIR. journal, 2015)
    In a marginalized group, personal suffering is inescapably united to excluding social and political structures and situations. To provide consolation to an individual then also involves showing a way of how the group ...
  • Consolation of Literature as Rhetorical Tradition: Issues and Examples 

    Agrell, Beata (LIR. journal, 2015)
    This article investigates a tradition of consolation in order to explore rhetorical strategies and literary devices of consolatory texts. The aim is to elucidate how the view of consolation has varied through history ...
  • Editorial: Consolation – literary and religious perspectives 

    Agrell, Beata; Möller, Håkan (LIR. journal, 2015)