Abstract
Can religious mystery have any relevance to children’s literature? The religious contexts in which the word ‘mystery’ is found immediately seem to challenge such a possibility. Paul’s sublime discourse about resurrection in his Epistle to the Corinthians, for instance, includes such clarion calls as: ‘[b]ehold I tell you a mystery … the dead shall be raised incorruptible … death is swallowed up in victory’ (1 Corinthians 15: 51). The author whose implied audience lacks the frame of reference possessed by the adult reader is inevitably deprived of possibilities for intertextual connections with evocative language such as this.
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© 2001 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Pinsent, P. (2001). ‘so great and beautiful that I cannot write them’: Religious Mystery and Children’s Literature. In: Gavin, A.E., Routledge, C. (eds) Mystery in Children’s Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985137_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985137_2
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