Trauma and transcendence: an introduction / Holly Faith Nelson -- Sacred proposals and the spiritual subliem / David Lyle Jeffrey -- "Loke in: how weet a wounde in heere!": the wounds of Christ as a sacred space in English devotional literature / Eleanor McCullough -- Suffering in the service of Venus: the sacred, the sublime, and Chaucerian joy in the middle part of the Parliament of fowls / Norm Klassen -- Listening to Lavinia: Emmanual Levina's sayind and said in Titus Andronicus / Sean Lawrence -- Precious stories: the discursive economy in Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece / Heather G.S. Johnson -- The sacred pain of penitence: the theology of John Donne's Holy Sonnets / David Anoby -- Bearing the cross: the Christian's response to suffering in Herbert's The Temple / Daniel W. Doerksen -- Horrific suffering, sacred terror, and sublime freedom in Helen Maria William's Peru / Natasha Duquette -- Joanna Baillie and the Christian Gothic: reforming society through the sublime / Christine A. Colón -- Sacramental suffering from the waters of redemption and transormation in George Eliot's fiction / Constance M. Fulner -- Christina Rossetti and the poetics of Tractarian suffering / Esther T. Hu -- Suffering in world and truth: seventeeth- and nineteenth-century Quaker women's autobiography / Robynne Rogers Healey -- Sacramental imagination: Eucharists of the ordinary universe in the works of Joyce, Proust and Wolof / Richard Kearney -- The Via Negativa in Forster's A passage to India / George Piggford -- Consolation in un/certainty: the sacred spaces of suffering in the children's fantasy literature of George Macdonald, C.S. Lewis, and Madeleine L'Engle / Monika B. Hilder -- The Messiah of history: the search of synchronicity in Miller's A canticle for Leibowitz / Deanna T. Smid -- Suffering and the sacred: Hugh Hood's The new age/Le nouveau siècle / Barbara Pell -- Fictional violations in Alice Munro's narratives / John C. Van Rys -- Thomas Merton and the aesthetics of the sublime: "a beautiful terror" / Lynn R. Szabo -- Belated beloved: time, trauma, and the sublime in Toni Morrison's Beloved / Steve Vine -- Annie Dillard on Holy ground: the artist as nun in the postmodern sublime / Deborah C. Bowen -- Passion plays by proxy: the Paschal face as interculturality in the works of Endō Shūsaku and Mishima Yukio / Sean Somers -- Testifying to the infinity of the Other: the sacred and ethical dimensions of secondary witnessing in Anne Karpf's The war after / Bettina Stumm -- Sacred space and the fellowship of suffering in the postmodern sublime / Richard J. Lane -- Suffering divine things : cruciform reasoning or incarnational hermenutics / Jens Zimmermann.