Alison Milbank

Contact

• workRoom C39 Humanities Building Department of Theology and Religious Studies
  University Park
  Nottingham
  NG7 2RD
  UK
• work0115 846 7209
• fax0115 951 5887
• alison.milbank@nottingham.ac.uk

Biography

My approach to religion and culture, attends particularly to stylistics, genres and poetics as themselves embodying theological meaning, as can be seen in my 'Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians'. It is this appraoch that undergirds my current project, which attends to the double gesture of liberation and nostalgic return of the Gothic narrative in relation to the fraught history of the Church of England's emergence in the sixteenth century, and the development of the doppelganger in relation to Lutheran and Calvinist accounts of conversion. My interest in the grotesque in Chesterton, Dante, Ruskin and also the Reformation is in the way amode of the monstrous and horrific can have a positive valence in aesthetics and theology.

Expertise Summary

Alison joined the Department of Theology in September 2004. She studied Theology and English Literature at Cambridge, and then took her doctorate at Lancaster. She was John Rylands Research Institute Fellow at Manchester and after temporary lectureships at Cambridge and Middlesex taught in the English Department at the University of Virginia for five years. Her research and teaching focuses on the relation of religion to culture in the post-Enlightenment period, with particular literary interest in non-realist literary and artistic expression, such as the Gothic, the fantastic, horror and fantasy. Her interest in medievalism led to a book on Dante and Victorian theology, history and art. Her study of G. K. Chesterton and Tolkien as theologians led to a co-written study of contemporary Anglican ecclesiology. She is currently working on an historical study of Gothic fiction from the Reformation to the end of the nineteenth century, aligning its rise and narrative tropes to Anglican theology and historiography.

Teaching Summary

I research and teach a range of areas in the fiield of religion and culture, specialising in non-realist literary production. Religion and lIterature takes stylistics and .genre as modes of… read more

Recent Publications

• MILBANK, A., 2008. Grotesque Realism in Ruskin's 'Praeterita': Autobiography and the World Beyond the Self Nineteenth Century Prose.
• MILBANK, ALISON, 2008. Huysmans, Machen and the Gothic Grotesque, Or: The Way Up is the Way Down. In: HORNER, AVRIL and ZLOSNIK, SUE, eds., Le Gothic:: Influences and Appropriations in Europe and America 1st edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 83-99
• MILBANK, A., 2007. Chesterton and Tolkien as theologians: the fantasy of the real London: T&T Clark.
• MILBANK, A., 2007. Josephine Butler's Apocalyptic vision of the prostitute and modern debates on prostitution. In: MILBANK, A., ed., Beating the traffic: Josephine Butler and Anglican social action on prostitution today Winchester: George Mann Publications. 89-104

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I research and teach a range of areas in the fiield of religion and culture, specialising in non-realist literary production. Religion and lIterature takes stylistics and .genre as modes of theological work in a range of texts from Greek tragedy to the novel. Fantasy explores the relation of truth claims and imagination in German and British fantastic stories and theoretical writing. I teach the relation of narrative to theology and spiritual autobiography. Dante is a strong teaching interest at the MA level but also as part of my introductory undergraduate module. Virtue ethics and literature is a new addition. In the past I have taught nineteenth century literature and theology, God and the Gothic and modernism and philosophy and may develop these again.

• MILBANK, A., 2008. Grotesque Realism in Ruskin's 'Praeterita': Autobiography and the World Beyond the Self Nineteenth Century Prose.
• MILBANK, ALISON, 2008. Huysmans, Machen and the Gothic Grotesque, Or: The Way Up is the Way Down. In: HORNER, AVRIL and ZLOSNIK, SUE, eds., Le Gothic:: Influences and Appropriations in Europe and America 1st edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 83-99
• MILBANK, A., 2007. Chesterton and Tolkien as theologians: the fantasy of the real London: T&T Clark.
• MILBANK, A., 2007. Josephine Butler's Apocalyptic vision of the prostitute and modern debates on prostitution. In: MILBANK, A., ed., Beating the traffic: Josephine Butler and Anglican social action on prostitution today Winchester: George Mann Publications. 89-104
• MILBANK, A. G., 2007. Gothic Femininities. In: SPOONER, C. and MCEVOY, E., eds., The Routledge Companion to the Gothic London: Routledge. 155-63
• ALISON MILBANK, ed., 2007. Beating the Traffic: Josephine Butler and Anglican Social Action Today Winchester, George Mann Publications.
• MILBANK, A., 2006. A Fine Grotesque or a Pathetic Fallacy? The Role of objects in the autobiographical writing of Ruskin and Proust. In: DICKINSON, R. and HANLEY, K., eds., Ruskin's struggle for coherence: Self-representation through art, place and society Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press. 90-105
• MILBANK, A., 2005. Tolkien and Gift Theory. In: Tolkien Seminar Papers
• MILBANK, A., OTTO, P. and MULVEY-ROBERTS, M., eds., 2004. Gothic Fiction: Rare Printed Works from the Sadleir-Black Collection of Gothic Fiction at the Alderman Library, University of Virginia: a listing and guide to the microfilm collection Marlborough: Adam Matthew.
• MILBANK, A., 2003. "My precious" : Tolkien's fetishized ring. In: BASSHAM, G. and BRONSON, E., eds., The Lord of the rings and philosophy: one book to rule them all Chicago: Open Court.
• MILBANK, A., 2002. The Victorian Gothic in English Novels and Stories, 1830-1880. In: HOGLE, J.E., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 145-165
• MILBANK, A., 1998. Dante and the Victorians Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• MILBANK, A., 1992. Daughters of the house: modes of the Gothic in Victorian fiction London: Macmillan.