Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion

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

• THE MODERN STORY OF RELIGION AND LITERATURE1. The Inward Turn: The Role of Matthew Arnold2. Religion and the Rise of English Studies3. Modernism and Religion4. The Influence and Limits of the Inklings5. Modern Debates: Christianity and Literature, Literature and Theology and Religion and Literature6. 9/11 and its Literary-Religious Aftermaths7. The Return to Religion: Secularization and its DiscontentsTHEORY8. Postsecular Studies9. The Importance of Philosophical Hermeneutics for Literature and Religion10. Reception11. Political Theology12. Phenomenology13. Paul Among the Theorists: A Genealogy of the New Universalism14. The Aesthetics of SimplicityFORM AND GENRE15. Theological Writing: How to Write a Theological Sentence16. Rue Saint-Augustin: The Remembering of God17. Epic18. Religion and Literary Tragedy: King Lear and the Problem of Evil19. Wes Anderson’s Messianic Elegies20. Comedy, Levity and Laughter: Parables of Agape21. Gothic Fiction and "belief in every kind of prodigy"22. The Bible and the Realist NovelSACRED TEXTS AND THEIR LITERARY AFTERLIVES23. Hosting the Divine Logos: Radical Hospitality and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment24. "Found in Every Room": Victorian Devotional Literature25. The Bhagavad Gītā in American Transcendentalism26. The "Problem" of Buddhism for Western Literature: Edwin Arnold to Jack Kerouac27. Midrash in Twentieth Century Jewish American Literature28. The Challenges of Re-writing Sacred Texts: The Case of Twenty-First Century Gospel Narratives29. The Authority of Sacred Texts in Science Fiction30. Apocalyptic Narration: The Qur’an in Contemporary Arabic FictionTHE POLITICS OF RELIGION AND LITERATURE31. Judaism and National Identity in Medieval England32. Hospitality as a Virtue in The Winter’s Tale33. "Oh, let that last will stand!": Reading Religion in Donne’s Holy Sonnets34. The Life of a Christian Saint: The Biography of Fannie McCray, Born and Raised A Slave35. Religious Pluralism and the Beats36. From Roshi to Rashi: Leonard Cohen’s Interfaith Dialogue37. Reconciliation in South Africa: World Literature, Global Christianity, Global Capital38. Imagining Islamism: Representations of Fundamentalism in the Twenty-First Century Arabic Novel