This book challenges the status quo of studies in literature and religion by returning to “experience” as a bridge between theory and practice. Essays focus on keywords of religious experience and demonstrate their applications in drama, fiction, and poetry.
Each chapter explores the broad significance of its keyword as a category of psychological and social behavior and tracks its unique articulation by individual authors, including Conrad, Beecher Stowe and Melville. Together, the chapters construct a critical foundation for studying literature not only from the perspectives of theology and historicism but from the ways that literary experience reflects, reinforces, and sometimes challenges religious experience.
Table of Contents:
Introduction - Matthew J. Smith, Azusa Pacific University& Caleb D. Spencer, Azusa Pacific University
1. Believing: Postsecular Belief and Unbelief in Marilynne Robinson's Home and James Wood's The Book Against God - Lori Branch, University of Iowa
2. Benediction: Shakespeare’s Post-Secular Choreography of Hope and Healing - Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine
3. Exercise: Poetry as Spiritual Exercise: On A. R. Ammons - Kevin Hart, University of Virginia
4. Fantasy: Superstition Fiction and Magic Revival in the Euro-American West and China- Zhange Ni, Virginia Polytechnic University
5. Gift: The (Im)possible Conditions of Grace in Melville’s Fiction - Tae Sung, California Baptist University
6. Guidance: Understanding Providence in George MacDonald’s Phantastes - Mark Knight, Lancaster University
7. Idolatry: Power, Meaning, and Violence in Conrad and Hesse - Larry D. Bouchard, University of Virginia
8. Interruption: Conversion as Event in Paul of Tarsus and Paul of Burgos - Ryan Szpiech, University of Michigan
9. Kindness: King Lear and Buddhism - Unhae Langis, Independent Scholar
10. Metanoia: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Artful Apprehension of Conversion in Uncle Tom's Cabin - John Gatta, Sewanee, The University of the South
11. One: Poetic Love in Ibn ‘Arabi - Jeffrey Sacks, University of California, Riverside
12. Prayer: I will Love You in the Summer Time - Christian Wiman, Yale Divinity School
13. Revelation: From Dante to Mallarmé via Shakespeare’s Hamlet: The Negativity of Poetic-Prophetic Revelation in Modernity - William Franke, Vanderbilt University
14. Silence: “Why Do You Hide Your Face?”: God’s Silence in William Paul Young’s The Shack - Christopher Douglas, University of Victoria
15. Turning: Alabaster’s Wager & the Experience of Conversion - James Kearney, University of California, Santa Barbara
16. Vision: ‘Was it a vision or a waking dream?”: Rethinking Romantic Ideology - Gavin Hopps, University of St. Andrews
Afterword: Terry Eagleton, Lancaster University
About the Author :
Matthew J. Smith is Associate Professor of English at Azusa Pacific University. He is the author of Performance and Religion in Early Modern England: Stage, Cathedral, Wagon, Street (Notre Dame, 2018) and co-editor, with Julia Lupton, of Face to Face in Shakespearean Drama (Edinburgh, 2019). He is guest editor of two special issues of Christianity & Literature: The
Sacramental Text Reconsidered (2016) and Sincerity (co-editor, 2017).
Caleb D. Spencer is Associate Professor of English at Azusa Pacific University. His essays appear in Religion & Literature, Journal of the Religion and Popular Culture, and Christianity & Literature. He co-edited Sincerity, a special issue of Christianity & Literature (2017). He also serves as Associate Editor of the journal, Christianity & Literature.
Review :
An exciting new collection that approaches complex questions, texts and authors from a fresh set of perspectives. These authors regard religion or spirituality not simply as a matter of intellectual assent but an embodied set of practices and phenomena. The so called ‘religious turn’ is reappraised and re-read in ways that powerfully remind us of its complexity and persistence.
