Religion, Literature and the Imagination: Sacred Worlds

Description

The study of religion and literature continues to go from strength to strength - this collection of essays offers a dynamic, lively and provocative contribution to the field and aims to map out new directions it might take. By returning to foundational questions regarding the relation between words and worlds and the parameters of the sacred, the essays explore different ways of using interdisciplinary resources to open up our understanding of religion and literature. Contributions from some of the leading voices in the field unite to offer an important exploration of the possible worlds that the study of religion and literature imagines.

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 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