The study of religion and literature continues to go from strength to strength - this collection of essays offers a dynamic, lively and provocative contribution to the field and aims to map out new directions it might take. By returning to foundational questions regarding the relation between words and worlds and the parameters of the sacred, the essays explore different ways of using interdisciplinary resources to open up our understanding of religion and literature. Contributions from some of the leading voices in the field unite to offer an important exploration of the possible worlds that the study of religion and literature imagines.
Author(s): Mark Knight, Louise Lee
Year: 2010
Language: English
Pages: 208
Contents......Page 6
Acknowledgements......Page 8
Notes on Contributors......Page 9
1. Introduction......Page 12
2. Notes toward a Supreme Addiction: The Theology Fiction of William Blake and Philip K. Dick......Page 19
3. God’s Little Mountains: Young Geoffrey Hill and the Problem of Religious Poetry......Page 34
4. Religion, Truth and the ‘New Aestheticism’......Page 48
5. The Deconstruction of Christianity: From the Hand of God to the Hand of Man......Page 58
6. Deity in Dispatches: The Crimean Beginnings of Muscular Christianity......Page 68
7. Israel Zangwill, Jewish Identity and Visceral Religion......Page 86
8. I Am Not Walter Benjamin......Page 98
9. ‘The Oldest Dream of All’: Heaven in Contemporary Fiction......Page 117
10. De Quincey’s Uses of the Bible: Biblical Time and Psychological Time......Page 134
11. Re-imagining Biblical Exegesis......Page 151
12. Saving Literary Criticism......Page 161
Notes......Page 173
C......Page 198
H......Page 199
P......Page 200
Z......Page 201
