Jeanette Winterson and Religion: (New Directions in Religion and Literature)

Since the publication of her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson quickly established herself as a powerful and insightful writer on sexuality and gender. However, the profound and persistent religious themes of her work have received much less critical attention. Jeanette Winterson and Religion is the first in-depth study of the ways in which Winterson navigates the sacred and the profane in the full range of her writing, from her first novel to later works such as The PowerBook and The Stone Gods. This book reads the author's work alongside the theological turn in the thought of such theorists as Alain Badiou, John D. Caputo and Julia Kristeva as well as feminist and queer theologians such as Catherine Keller and Marcella Althaus-Reid. In this way, Jeanette Winterson and Religion reveals how Jeanette Winterson stakes out a unique and intriguing post-secular literary form of the sacred.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction 2. ‘I Love Both of Them’: Queer Love and the Religious in Oranges are not the Only Fruit 3. ‘Colours and Folly’: Retelling the Noah Story in Boating For Beginners 4. The Love Event in The Passion 5. Sexing the Cherry and the Monstrous Maternal 6. Written on the Body and the Negative Theology Tradition 7. Art & Lies: Literature in a Neoliberal Age 8. Gut Symmetries, New Physics and Kabbalah 9. The PowerBook and Virtual Culture 10.Lighthousekeeping and the Religious Vocation 11.The Stone Gods’ Climate Change Apocalypse 12. Conclusion

About the Author :
Emily McAvan is Sessional Tutor at Monash University, Australia. She is the author of The Postmodern Sacred (2012).

Review :
McAvan’s text does not disappoint in the insights it offers. As well as creating a thorough and informative study of Winterson’s major works, McAvan also succeeds in her overall aim – to establish that, with a reappearance of the divine in the secular cultural space of postmodernism, Winterson creates an art of major import through a “return of the sacred in the post-secular world” (170). Emily McAvan incisively interrogates a theme conspicuous by its absence in most extant criticism of Winterson’s writing: the fierce interplay of religion with sexuality, gender and power. Here queerness and holiness are interwoven as visionary, and Winterson herself is claimed as prophetic. In this expansive book, McAvan highlights Winterson’s generative deconstruction of binaries such as secular and sacred, sameness and otherness, belief and unbelief, and identifies her as a perceptive religious thinker. At long last a powerful study of a queer and feminist writer that brings the body and the spirit together. In this finely written book Em McAvan turns to the postmodern sacred to provide a rigorous theoretical framework for a reading of Jeanette Winterson's novels of lesbian and bisexual love.