Contents: Introduction: Writing and Jesus - an elective affinity; Christology as writing into rupture; Augustine and the form of the subject in/of the Imago Dei; Poetics of the subject and the sacred into the 19th century: Friedrich Schiller and the mythos of the human spirit; Friedrich Hölderlin and Empedokles; Goethe and the morphological Bildung in Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre; Hegel and the unwriting of the self; Theological poetics of Jesus amidst 19th century higher criticism: F.C. Baur and the "universal yet particular" Christ of Church History; Ludwig Feuerbach and The Essence of Christianity; David Friedrich Strauss and Mythi in Das Leben Jesu; Victorian poetics and (re)writing Jesus: Figuring Jesus in the Victorian novel; J.A. Froude - The Nemesis of Faith; Walter Pater - Marius the Epicurean; Mrs. Humphrey Ward - Robert Elsmere; Scenes of Clerical Life - Images under erasure: Heidegger reads Eliot - the 'possible' of poetics; Adam Bede - Poetics of the possible and learning to 'see': Iconographic reading - Chapter XVII and Dutch realism; (Wo)men in the garden; A poetics of Jesus in Adam Bede; The Mill on the Floss - transfigurational writing as incarnation: The Bildung of organicism and a poetics of Jesus; Imitatio Jesus/ Imitatio Maggie - writing into transfigurational flowing; Conclusion - a poetic cartography of grace; Bibliography; Index.