Rewriting the Word "God"

Romana Huk is professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She is author of Stevie Smith: Between the Lines, coeditor of Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Theory and Criticism, and editor of Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally. She is also editor of the journal Religion & Literature.

"The capacious range of thinkers—from philosophy, theology, poetry—brought into the study manifests an amazingly comprehensive intellectual context that the author has analyzed, synthesized, and laid before us in strikingly original and foundational ways for reading this poetry and its religious leanings." —Linda Kinnahan author of Feminist Modernism, Poetics, and the New Economy: Mina Loy, Lola Ridge, and Marianne Moore"This is a book bursting with critical intelligence and exhilarating ambition. Romana Huk explores several difficult frontiers at once—between Christian and Jewish imagination, between reflection on our wordless absorption in what cannot be contained and the necessity for close reading of texts and narratives, and between transcendence and secularity—and the result is an intellectual and spiritual feast of insight."—Rowan Williams, author of The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language""A fascinating, original, and compelling guide to the tangled life of poetics and metaphysics in modern and contemporary verse. Every page of this long book bears the mark of deep learning acquired and refined over decades. It is Huk's formidable achievement to show how avant-garde poets think theologically."—Michael D. Hurley, author of Faith in Poetry: Verse Style as a Mode of Religious Belief"This epic, ranging, and inclusive study of modernist and innovative poetry in relation to evolving traditions of Judeo-Christian belief rewires and reanimates our understanding of American and British poets and advances models of theopoetics well judged to help other scholars respond to the twenty-first century 'return of religion.'"—John Kerrigan, author of Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–1707

• Preface (or Argument) Acknowledgments Introduction: Contexts, In the Arc PART I 1. How Myth Became the Real World 2. Demythologizing Demythologization PART II 3. On the Evolving “Subject” of Postwar Judeo-Christianity, or: The Return of the Wandering Jew 4. Diasporic Devekuth and Deconstruction’s “New Spirit” 5. “A Single Liturgy,” or: Liberation Poetry Epilogue (or Prologue) Notes Works Cited