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 contextualized, this volume is an engaging introduction to this huge and complex field.
Introduction Religion, Literature, and the Art of Conversation
Mark Knight
Part I THE MODERN STORY OF LITERATURE AND RELIGION
1 The Inward Turn: The Role of Matthew Arnold,
Joshua King
2 Religion and the Rise of English Studies
Dayton Haskin
3 Modernism and Religion
Anthony Domestico
4 The Influence and Limits of the Inklings
Trevor Hart
5 Modern Debates: Christianity and Literature, Literature and Theology and Religion and Literature
Matthias Bauer and Angelika Zirker
6 9/11 and its Literary-Religious Aftermaths
Mark Eaton
7 The Return to Religion: Secularization and its Discontents
Devorah Baum
Part II THEORY
8 Postsecular Studies
Lori Branch
9 The Importance of Philosophical Hermeneutics for Literature and Religion
Jens Zimmermann
10 Reception
Duc Dau
11 Political Theology
Jared Hickman
12 Phenomenology
Kevin Hart
13 Paul Among the Theorists: A Genealogy of the New Universalism
William Franke
14 The Aesthetics of Simplicity
Jo Carruthers
Part III FORM AND GENRE
15 Theological Writing: How to Write a Theological Sentence
Stanley Hauerwas
16 Rue Saint-Augustin: The Remembering of God
John Schad
17 Epic
Peter S. Hawkins
18 Religion and Literary Tragedy: King Lear and the Problem of Evil,
Ben Saunders
19 Wes Anderson’s Messianic Elegies
Emma Mason
20 Comedy, Levity and Laughter: Parables of Agape
Gavin Hopps
21 Gothic Fiction and "belief in every kind of prodigy"
Deidre Shauna Lynch
22 The Bible and the Realist Novel
Jan-Melissa Schramm
Part IV THE LITERARY AFTERLIVES OF SACRED TEXTS AND TRADITIONS
23 Hosting the Divine Logos: Radical Hospitality and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment
Valentina Izmirlieva
24 "Found in Every Room": Victorian Devotional Literature
Krista Lysack
25 The Bhagavad Gītā in American Transcendentalism
Alan Hodder
26 The "Problem" of Buddhism for Western Literature: Edwin Arnold to Jack Kerouac
James Najarian
27 Midrash in Twentieth Century Jewish American Literature
Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg
28 The Challenges of Re-writing Sacred Texts: The Case of Twenty-First Century Gospel Narratives
Andrew Tate
29 The Authority of Sacred Texts in Science Fiction
James H. Thrall
30 Apocalyptic Narration: The Qur’an in Contemporary Arabic Fiction
Ziad Elmarsafy
Part V THE POLITICS OF LITERATURE AND RELIGION
31 Judaism and National Identity in Medieval England
Samantha Zacher
32 Hospitality as a Virtue in The Winter’s Tale
John D. Cox
33 "Oh, let that last will stand!": Reading Religion in Donne’s Holy Sonnets
Susannah Brietz Monta
34 The Life of a Christian Saint: The Biography of Fannie McCray, Born and Raised A Slave
Yolanda Pierce
35 Religious Pluralism and the Beats
Luke Ferretter
36 From Roshi to Rashi: Leonard Cohen’s Interfaith Dialogue
Peter Jaeger
37 Reconciliation in South Africa: World Literature, Global Christianity, Global Capital
Colin Jager
38 Imagining Islamism: Representations of Fundamentalism in the Twenty-First Century Arabic Novel
Arthur Bradley & Abir Hamdar
Biography
Mark Knight is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, UK.
"The most striking aspect of The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion is its willingness to take seriously the distinctiveness of the faith traditions and theologies that it discusses [...] Readers new to this conversation might be surprised by what they find here; for those already involved, this book offers a significant opportunity to reflect on the range of our current conversations and on the directions in which they might move next."
- Simon Marsden, The Glass