ABSTRACT
This unique and comprehensive volume looks at the study of literature and religion from a contemporary critical perspective. Including discussion of global literature and world religions, this Companion looks at:
- Key moments in the story of religion and literary studies from Matthew Arnold through to the impact of 9/11
- A variety of theoretical approaches to the study of religion and literature
- Different ways that religion and literature are connected from overtly religious writing, to subtle religious readings
- Analysis of key sacred texts and the way they have been studied, re-written, and questioned by literature
- Political implications of work on religion and literature
Thoroughly introduced and contextualised, this volume is an engaging introduction to this huge and complex field.
THE MODERN STORY OF RELIGION AND LITERATURE
1. The Inward Turn: The Role of Matthew Arnold
2. Religion and the Rise of English Studies
3. Modernism and Religion
4. The Influence and Limits of the Inklings
5. Modern Debates: Christianity and Literature, Literature and Theology and Religion and Literature
6. 9/11 and its Literary-Religious Aftermaths
7. The Return to Religion: Secularization and its Discontents
THEORY
8. Postsecular Studies
9. The Importance of Philosophical Hermeneutics for Literature and Religion
10. Reception
11. Political Theology
12. Phenomenology
13. Paul Among the Theorists: A Genealogy of the New Universalism
14. The Aesthetics of Simplicity
FORM AND GENRE
15. Theological Writing: How to Write a Theological Sentence
16. Rue Saint-Augustin: The Remembering of God
17. Epic
18. Religion and Literary Tragedy: King Lear and the Problem of Evil
19. Wes Anderson’s Messianic Elegies
20. Comedy, Levity and Laughter: Parables of Agape
21. Gothic Fiction and "belief in every kind of prodigy"
22. The Bible and the Realist Novel
SACRED TEXTS AND THEIR LITERARY AFTERLIVES
23. Hosting the Divine Logos: Radical Hospitality and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment
24. "Found in Every Room": Victorian Devotional Literature
25. The Bhagavad Gītā in American Transcendentalism
26. The "Problem" of Buddhism for Western Literature: Edwin Arnold to Jack Kerouac
27. Midrash in Twentieth Century Jewish American Literature
28. The Challenges of Re-writing Sacred Texts: The Case of Twenty-First Century Gospel Narratives
29. The Authority of Sacred Texts in Science Fiction
30. Apocalyptic Narration: The Qur’an in Contemporary Arabic Fiction
THE POLITICS OF RELIGION AND LITERATURE
31. Judaism and National Identity in Medieval England
32. Hospitality as a Virtue in The Winter’s Tale
33. "Oh, let that last will stand!": Reading Religion in Donne’s Holy Sonnets
34. The Life of a Christian Saint: The Biography of Fannie McCray, Born and Raised A Slave
35. Religious Pluralism and the Beats
36. From Roshi to Rashi: Leonard Cohen’s Interfaith Dialogue
37. Reconciliation in South Africa: World Literature, Global Christianity, Global Capital
38. Imagining Islamism: Representations of Fundamentalism in the Twenty-First Century Arabic Novel
