Religion, Literature and the Imagination

Louise Lee is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at King's College London, UK. Mark Knight is Reader in English Literature at Roehampton University, UK. His books include Chesterton and Evil (Fordham University Press, 2004), Biblical Religion and the Novel, 1700-2000 (co-edited with Thomas Woodman, Ashgate, 2006), and Nineteenth- Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (co-written with Emma Mason, OUP, 2007). With Emma Mason he is editing the new book series New Directions in Religion and Literature for Continuum.

"This volume brings together an extraordinary range of writing on poets from Ezekiel to Blake, on novelists from Kingsley to Coupland and on theorists from Adorno to Derrida, all of whom can be seen to rescue literary criticism from the grip of positivism and materialism while illustrating Hartman's suggestion that religion remains more alive in the arts than in the pages of more orthodox theologians." - Professor Terry Wright, School of English, Newcastle University, UK 'In this more than impressive collection, Mark Knight and Louise Lee have gathered an international group of scholars renowned for their work at the interface between theology and literary study, faith and critical theory. In ways both profound and provocative, these writers listen for the words--and echoes of words--that seem to come from elsewhere, from speakers just out of sight. Theirs is a criticism that goes beyond the text to that which it speaks, to the truth of its claims. With care and subtle attention, they explore the imbrication of worlds; the interchange between reality and its imagining that makes life both human and divine." Gerard Loughlin, Professor of Theology, Durham University, UK

• Notes on Contributors; Acknowledgements; Introduction, Mark Knight and Louise Lee (Roehampton University, UK); Notes Toward a Supreme Addiction: The Theology Fiction of William Blake and Philip K. Dick, Geoffrey Hartman (Yale University, USA); 3. God's Little Mountains: Young Geoffrey Hill and the Problem of Religious Poetry, Kevin Hart (University of Virginia, USA); 4. Religion, Truth and the 'New Aestheticism', Robert Eaglestone (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK); 5. The Deconstruction of Christianity: From the Hand of God to the Hand of Man, Arthur Bradley (Lancaster University, UK); 6. Deity in Dispatches: Charles Kingsley and the Crimean Roots of Muscular Christianity, Louise Lee (Roehampton University, UK); 7. Israel Zangwill, Jewish Identity, and Visceral Religion, Jo Carruthers (Bristol University, UK); 8. I am Not Walter Benjamin, John Schad (Lancaster University, UK); 10. 'The Oldest Dream of All': Heaven in Contemporary Fiction, Andrew Tate (Lancaster University, UK); 11. Biblical Time and Psychological Time: De Quincey's Uses of the Bible, Jonathan Roberts (Liverpool University, UK); 12. Re-imagining Biblical Exegesis, Christopher Rowland (Oxford University, UK); 13. Saving Literary Criticism, Mark Knight (Roehampton University, UK) and Emma Mason (University of Warwick, UK); Index.