1st Edition

The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion

Edited By Mark Knight Copyright 2016
    480 Pages
    by Routledge

    480 Pages
    by Routledge

    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