Glimpses of Her Father's Glory: Deification and Divine Light in Longfellow's Evangeline

Henry Wadsworth Longfellows Evangeline was a bestseller in nineteenth-century America inspiring generations of readers with a heroine who overcomes colonial violence and exile in her romantic and spiritual quest across America. Long ignored by modernist scholars Evangeline is finally getting the critical attention it deserves. Drawing on original research in Longfellows scholarly manuscripts Bartel explores the theological sources and spiritual world of Evangeline arguing that Longfellow was inspired by the church fathers to craft Evangeline into a heroine who uniquely exemplifies in her epic quest the ancient Christian doctrines of deification and divine light. Bartels Glimpses of Her Fathers Glory returns Evangeline to its rightful place as a major poem of American literature one that takes as its theme nothing less than the ultimate purpose of human existence. Evangeline is one of the neglected masterpieces of American literature. It not only presents a compelling story told in language of astonishing beauty--the meter of Homer and Virgil truly brought to life in English for the first time--Evangeline is also a tale of deep moral political and theological depth. In our age of political refugees and religious persecution these issues remain terrifyingly relevant. How good to see Timothy Bartel dig into the theological sources and implications of Longfellows North American epic. --Dana Gioia author of Pity the Beautiful Focusing on Longfellows interest in patristics Timothy Bartels new work also contributes to the recent rediscovery of Longfellow as a wonderfully learned deeply reflective and inevitably cosmopolitan poet. --Christoph Irmscher author of Longfellow Redux Timothy E. G. Bartel is assistant professor of Great Texts & Writing at The College at Saint Constantine. He holds a PhD in Divinity from University of St Andrews and an MFA in Poetry from Seattle Pacific University. He is the author of Arroyos: Sijo and Other Poems (2015) and Aflame But Unconsumed: Poems (2019). . His essays and poems have appeared in Christianity and Literature Notes & Queries and Saint Katherine Review.