It would be impossible to do justice to recent theological conversation about creation and creativity without giving serious attention to the offerings of process theology. Characterised by a privileging of creativity within both the world and the godhead, and offering an attractive connection between human and divine creativity, process theology provides what seems to be a promising avenue for the theological work required. Catherine Keller’s Face of the Deep represents the most compelling and influential recent articulation of a process theology of creation and creativity. Its careful, daring, and imaginative engagement with scripture, and the literary and philosophical traditions presents the best of the process theological tradition. By a close examination of Keller’s Face of the Deep, however, I demonstrate how, despite its manifest attractions to a theology of mythopoiesis, Keller’s process theology is unable to account for the novum of human making while preserving the witness of the creedal tradition of Christian faith or falling into a dangerous nihilism.

The mythic dimension of the cultural operations of human being represent a vital location for understanding not only the processes of mythopoiesis, but also the theological dynamics of cultural change. The questions of how mythic sensibilities encounter one another and how mythic sensibilities change as a result of such encounters shed light on what we mean by culture, human ways of being, as a participation in the life and activity of God. In what follows, we will observe what is meant, specifically, by the encounter of mythic sensibilities, as distinct from the other dynamics of the flux of culture. Given Milbank’s insights into the origins of the mythos of secular modernity, we will continue to engage with his analysis of mythic difference. By a close examination of his use of mythos in Theology and Social Theory, however, it becomes clear that his agonistic understanding of difference cannot finally serve a Christian theology of mythopoiesis and understanding of difference.

In the three decades from the uprising of the enslaved in Saint-Domingue in 1791 to the recognition of Haitian independence by France in 1825, even amid the bitterest struggles, theatrical productions never fully stopped. When Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed independence, many of the officers surrounding him were directly involved in the theatre, as playwrights, actors, or both. Looking at figures such as Juste Chanlatte, Guy-Joseph Bonnet, Pierre-Charles Lys, Antoine Dupré and Jules Solime Milscent, this chapter makes a case for the importance of the theatre in the early years of Haitian independence as a reflection of the country’s evolving society, but also as a mirror and vector of domestic and international politics. A source of public entertainment and information designed and utilized for the most part by the country’s elites, the theatre was a prime tool in shaping and projecting idealized representations of the new nation and its leaders, within the country and to the outside world.

Haitian poetry experienced a shift, beginning as early as the 1870s, away from nationally inspired themes toward a greater insistence on poetic form and a penchant for contemplative verse. Poets often pondered abstract notions like the passage of time or the mysteries of nature. Other times they chose to write from the anguish of personal experience, mourning the loss of love to death or betrayal. Their melancholic reflections were not necessarily devoid of politics. Poets Virginie Sampeur, Massillon Coicou, and Etzer Vilaire composed their own eclectic poetry years before contributing to the famous journal La Ronde. Theirs is a poetics of ‘disenchantment’, a term that permeates the pages of the journal and characterizes their reactions to Haiti’s distressing domestic and international political situation. I offer an assessment of these three key poets and of the journal, affirming and going beyond the idea of the ‘understated political aspect’ of the movement. I demonstrate that the politics occasioning and emanating from this poetry embody distinctly Haitian calls for literary perseverance, a prescient battle for national preservation to which La Ronde is dedicated.

How, this chapter asks, does twentieth- and twenty-first-century Haitian theater shed new light on Haitian history and ask burning questions of the nation’s present? Turning to drama has enabled many Haitian dramatists to reach out to wider audiences including illiterate or semi-literate people, as they straddle the divide between oral and written, as well as French and Creole. Many of the dramas explored here retell Haitian origin tales of dismemberment and reassembly. I identify a tradition and dynamics of adapting, remaking, reworking, and remixing that span much Haitian theater. Haitian drama often not only remakes the original material itself but also changes ways of seeing the world from a Haitian point of view. Haitian dramatists’ approaches to translation, adaptation, remaking, and remixing sometimes change the original language, or shift the political and cultural contexts to a Haitian worldview. These acts of rasanblaj often reflect on Haitian history, culture, and current events through a process of constant remaking and call-and-response collaborative interaction. Haitian drama portrays the Haitian people as the main actors and agents in their own stories.

While Jacques Roumain’s classic novel Gouverneurs de la rosée foregrounds the possibility and necessity of return to Haiti, in many other literary versions of Haitian exile such a reconnection is never achieved. The returning wanderer can never just pick up where they left off, and the exile is definitive, unending. The chapter argues that exile for Haitian authors of the twentieth century is not merely a question of space or place; it has temporal dimensions that can compound the sense of separation or loss. Following a consideration of nineteenth-century exile-related poems, the chapter engages with some of the most prominent essayists, poets, and novelists whose works serve as chronicles of the multi-generational experiences of separation from Haiti before, during, and after the Duvalier dictatorships. As the examples show, experiences of exile vary widely and are determined by many factors, including personal circumstance, the place and conditions of exile, changing realities in the homeland, and evolving notions of exile itself, and of the ways in which it is written by successive generations of authors.

The Christian can speak meaningfully of Christ as the ground and norm of this mythopoieic faculty and that mythopoiesis in contemporary secularity is finally judged by the mythos of Christ as both myth and myth-maker. Beginning with an observation of the mythopoieic elements in the fantasy fiction of Tolkien, Rowling, Pratchett, and Le Guin, I have attempted to contextualise their employment of and delight in a ‘mythic sensibility’ within a Christian theology of human participation in divine creativity. The implication of all such mythopoiesis into the mythopoiesis of Christ and in Christ is ultimately a seeking after God, a being-drawn into the Trinitarian return of God to God. Even when this desire has gone astray, it remains bound up in the Trinitarian procession, by virtue of God’s grace in creation, and in the redemption of the world through Jesus Christ. Our mythopoieic faculty remains redeemable because it, like all human endeavour, remains hallowed by the Incarnation and taken up by the risen Christ.

This chapter considers how we might approach the intertextual relationship between two highly fragmentary texts, in this case Sophocles’ Judgement, a satyr play that dramatised the Judgement of Paris, and the epic Cypria in which that mythological episode featured. The exiguous textual remains of both works are taken as a prompt to consider intertextuality in its broader sense, namely the interrelationship of texts in ways that go beyond direct verbal allusion. The framework of possible worlds is employed to conceptualise the relationship between satyr drama and the world of epic and tragedy on which it draws, suggesting that the latter may be thought of as an actual world on which the alternative world of the former is predicated. Using this as a model of intertextuality allows us to examine the movements of the satyric plot as it opens up and closes down possibilities for radically alternative outcomes. In this reading of Judgement, we see Sophocles engaging with both the Cypria and that epic’s own intertextual network, with the satyrs acting paradoxically as both disruptors of the mythical tradition and a force that supports the story reaching its traditional conclusion.

This chapter considers some aspects of the intertextual and intervisual dynamics of Euripides’ Cyclops with particular reference to the cave represented by the skēnē. The particular links of the Cyclops to Sophocles’ Philoctetes are used to explore a network of allusive possibilities in both plays going back to Homer’s ‘Cave of the Nymphs’ in Odyssey 13 and embracing the lost Philoctetes plays of Aeschylus and Euripides. The powerful mediating role of Homer’s cave is seen to be transferred to the caves of drama as the boundary between the seen and the unseen, between the past, present, and future, and as a strongly suggestive marker of the difference between epic narrative and dramatic representation. As the Homeric cave had separate entrances for mortals and gods, so did the Athenian stage. In exploring some of the richness of ‘intertextual allusion’ in fifth-century drama, the chapter also contributes to the appreciation of the differences in allusive practice between tragedy, comedy, and satyr play and of how poets acknowledged and exploited those differences.

Radio Haïti-Inter, Haiti’s most prominent independent radio station and the first station to regularly broadcast news, reportage, and interviews in Haitian Creole, is best known for its investigative journalism, political analysis, and pro-democracy activism under its famous director, Jean Léopold Dominique. But Radio Haiti was also a place where artists of all kinds, especially literary writers, presented, discussed, and declaimed their work to a wide public over the airwaves. In fact, there is no clear line between Radio Haiti’s political content and its literary content. Many of Radio Haiti’s journalists, including Dominique himself and his daughter, novelist Jan J. Dominique, were also literary writers. A literary sensibility suffused much of their content; discussing art or literature allowed them to talk about the country’s social and political situation in a hostile realm; and much of the literary work contains implicit or explicit political meaning. Creating a platform that allowed a wider audience to experience literary works through programs like Radio Haiti’s “Entre Nous” was a political, revolutionary act.

If a Christian account of mythopoiesis owns that not only do all things depend upon God for their being, but that ‘all things exist in Christ’, then following Ward, we can assert that mythopoiesis, as a cultural artefact, is shot through with God’s presence: it is a means by which God is revealing God’s self to us. To the degree a myth speaks truly of God it can be understood as participating in God’s self-disclosure to creation; to the degree it is enmeshed in and occluded by sin, myth speaks less truly. Following Henri de Lubac, I argue that the nature–grace distinction can be overstated and that a paradoxical affirmation of the operation of grace within nature without violating the proper autonomy of creation is necessary in order to meaningfully express how human action (mythopoiesis) apart from Christian formation can be said to speak of God (theology). The interplay of the cultural mediation of God’s grace and God’s already-there-ness in nature offers a way of speaking about mythopoiesis’ theological possibilities without necessarily resorting to a doctrine of ‘anonymous Christianity’.

How much continuity was there in the allusive practices of the ancient world? This chapter explores this question here by considering the early Greek precedent for the so-called ‘Alexandrian footnote’, a device often regarded as one of the most learned and bookish in a Roman poet’s allusive arsenal. Ever since Stephen Hinds opened his foundational Allusion and Intertext with this device, it has been considered the preserve of Hellenistic and Roman scholar-poets. This chapter, however, argues that we should back-date the phenomenon all the way to the archaic age. By considering a range of illustrative examples from epic (Iliad, Odyssey, Hesiod), lyric (Sappho, Pindar, Simonides), and tragedy (Sophocles, Euripides, Theodectes), it demonstrates that the ‘Alexandrian footnote’ has a long history before Alexandria.