Reading the Abrahamic Faiths: Rethinking Religion and Literature

Description

Rethinking religion and literature in a series of chapters by leading international scholars, Reading the Abrahamic Faiths opens up a dialogue between Jewish, Christian, Islamic and Post-Secular literary cultures. Literary studies has absorbed religion as another interdisciplinary mode of inquiry without always attending to its multifacted potential to question ideologically neutral readings of culture, belief, emotion, politics and inequality. In response, Reading the Abrahamic Faiths contributes to a reevaluation of the nexus between religion and literature that is socially, affectively and materially determined in its sensitivity to the expression of belief. Each section - Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Post-Secularism - is introduced by a specialist in these respective areas to introduce the critical readings of the texts and discourses that follow.

Emma Mason is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK, and an editor of Bloombury's New Directions in Religion and Literature series.

The product of a conference titled 'Religious Identities in Literature,' this illuminating collection of essays by a group of distinguished international scholars focuses on the intimate connection between religion, literature, and faith. Collectively, the essays aim to innovate new strategies for exploring the significance of the religious and the secular, as these animating phenomena are brought to consciousness through literary works ... Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. -- H. I. Einsohn, Middlesex Community College * CHOICE *