1st Edition
Narrative and Belief The Religious Affordance of Supernatural Fiction
Introduction – Narrative and Belief: The Religious Affordance of Supernatural Fiction 1. The difference between religious narratives and fictional literature: a matter of degree only 2. The religious affordance of fiction: towards a catalogue of veracity mechanisms in supernatural narratives 3. Contemporary fantasy fiction and representations of religion: playing with reality, myth and magic in His Dark Materials and Harry Potter 4.Fiction into religion: imagination, other worlds, and play in the formation of community 5. On elves and freethinkers: criticism of religion and the emergence of the literary fantastic in Nordic literature
Biography
Markus Altena Davidsen is University Lecturer in the Sociology of Religion at Leiden University, The Netherlands. For his doctoral dissertation, ‘The Spiritual Tolkien Milieu: A Study of Fiction-based Religion’ (2014), he received the Gerardus van der Leeuw Dissertation Award from the Dutch Association for the Study of Religion.
"Whether or not religion scholars are interested in fantasy literature, the analysis of affordances in this volume has a number of exciting theoretical implications for the field. I found these insights applicable to horror texts such as The Exorcist, which a number of historians have connected to the resurgence of exorcism and deliverance ministry in the 1970s. There are also important implications for the study of conspiracy theories and what political scientist Michael Barkun called “fact-fiction reversals,” in which conspiracy theorists claim that nominally fictional stories are actually true. More broadly, the authors demonstrate that narrative is an incredibly important, yet surprisingly understudied dimension of religious studies. We will likely be reading about affordances again in the future."
Joseph P. Laycock, Texas State University
