The English Hymn: Studies in a Genre is the first book to examine hymns within their historical, literary/theoretical, social, musical, editorial and doctrinal contexts. In so doing, this book demonstrates the cultural centrality and unique nature of one of the most widely known and memorized genres in English. This examination crosses normative disciplinary lines and poses some fundamental and post-modernist questions about the traditional study of the origin, phenomenological genesis, reception, transmission and revision of both significant and popular literary texts.