Religion, Literature and the Imagination

Mark Knight is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, Canada. His books include Chesterton and Evil (2004), Biblical Religion and the Novel, 1700-2000 (co-edited with Thomas Woodman, 2006), Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (co-written with Emma Mason, OUP, 2006), An Introduction to Religion and Literature (2009) and Religion, Literature and the Imagination (co-edited with Louise Lee, 2009). Current projects include: a monograph entitled Good Words: Evangelicalism and the Victorian Novel; a co-authored book (with Emma Mason) entitled Faithful Reading: Poetry and Christian Practice; and a co-edited volume (with Jo Carruthers and Andrew Tate) entitled A Bible and Literature Reader. With Emma Mason, Mark Knight edits the book series New Directions in Religion and Literature for Bloomsbury Academic. Louis Lee is lecturer in English Literature at the University of Roehampton, where she researches laughter and Victorian science. She also serves on the editorial board of the Gaskell Journal, having been its editor and co-editor (2010-2013).

"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 Terence Wright, Newcastle University, UK

• Notes on ContributorsAcknowledgements1. Introduction, Mark Knight and Louise Lee (Roehampton University, UK) 2. 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