ABSTRACT
Iconology, which is the study of situations, paradigms, and figurations in the arts, thus has much to offer not only the art, literary, and cultural historian but also the critic and theoretician of literature as well. The contrast between Christian and post-Christian intonations of the shipwreck paradigm appears in the fourth book of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage where Byron employs both of them. The use of the shipwreck as punishment or test hardly ceases entirely with the onset of Romanticism, but there are not many major authors like Gerard Manley Hopkins who believe firmly enough to use the commonplace in the traditional Christian manner. Hopkins deplores England, his own nation, because it is Protestant, having fallen away from Roman Catholicism, which he takes to be the true faith, centuries before. Metaphor always plays a crucial role in this autobiographical self-recognition and self-creation since it provides a ready means of perceiving order in an otherwise inchoate experience.
