“Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, the proper study of Mankind is Man”. Despite this wise imperative expressed by Alexander Pope in his Essay on Man (1733-34), the need to “vindicate the ways of God to Man” has always interested the most intelligent minds in both philosophy and theology, among them Plato, Aristotle, St Augustine, William King, Leibniz, and Kant. Theodicy is the attempt to explain the paradoxical coexistence of suffering and Divine benevolence; why, theodicists ask, does God, who is believed to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, permit evil to exist at all. The present volume studies the literary discussion of theodicy analysing a wide range of novels, dramas, and poetry from American, Canadian, Irish, English, French and German literatures. The essays – contributed by a team of internationally renowned scholars – discuss the poetic treatment of theodicy from the 17th and 18th centuries to the postmodern period: the catalogue of authors considered includes names such as Francis Bacon, John Milton, William King, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, William Wordsworth, Oscar Wilde, Albert Camus, John Fowles, Ian McEwan and Irvine Welsh, to name but a few. The book thus illustrates the close traditional affiliation between literature and theodicy and demonstrates that – at least during some phases of their common history – literature could be regarded as theodicy.
