Religion has always been an integral part of the literary tradition: many canonical and non-canonical texts engage extensively with religious ideas, and the development of English Literature as a professional discipline began with an explicit consideration of the relationship between religion and literature. Literature also plays an important role in religious writing, as twentieth-century work on narrative theology has acknowledged. Both the recent theological turn of literary theory and the renewed political significance of religious debate in contemporary western culture have generated further interest in this interdisciplinary area. An Introduction to Religion and Literature offers a lucid, accessible and thoughtful introduction to the study of religion and literature. While the focus is on Christian theology and post-1800 British literature, substantial reference is made to earlier writers, texts from North America and mainland Europe, and other faith positions. Each chapter takes up a major theological idea and explores it through close readings of well-known and influential literary texts.

Featuring a selection from over 80 key texts, this anthology aims to help the reader to understand the common origins of religious expression and of literature. The texts included cover classical literature, the Bible, English and European classics and contemporary works.

The Bible played a crucial role in shaping Anglo-Saxon national and cultural identity. However, access to Biblical texts was necessarily limited to very few individuals in Medieval England. In this book, Samantha Zacher explores how the very earliest English Biblical poetry creatively adapted, commented on and spread Biblical narratives and traditions to the wider population. Systematically surveying the manuscripts of surviving poems, the book shows how these vernacular poets commemorated the Hebrews as God's 'chosen people' and claimed the inheritance of that status for Anglo-Saxon England. Drawing on contemporary translation theory, the book undertakes close readings of the poems Exodus, Daniel and Judith in order to examine their methods of adaptation for their particular theologico-political circumstances and the way they portray and problematize Judaeo-Christian religious identities.

This unique and comprehensive volume looks at the study of literature and religion from a contemporary critical perspective. Including discussion of global literature and world religions, this Companion looks at: Key moments in the story of religion and literary studies from Matthew Arnold through to the impact of 9/11 A variety of theoretical approaches to the study of religion and literature Different ways that religion and literature are connected from overtly religious writing, to subtle religious readings Analysis of key sacred texts and the way they have been studied, re-written, and questioned by literature Political implications of work on religion and literature Thoroughly introduced and contextualised, this volume is an engaging introduction to this huge and complex field.

Religion and literature is the study of interrelationships between religious or theological traditions and literary traditions, both oral and written, with special attention to religious or theological underpinnings of, influences upon, and reflections in, individual “texts” (oral and written) or authors’ oeuvres. Religion and Literature: History and Method by Eric Ziolkowski considers the origins and history of, and methods employed in, that scholarly enterprise, focusing on the dual construals of “literature” in religious studies (as a body of sacred writings and as writing valued for artistic merit); the problematics of defining “religion”; the transformation of theology and literature as a “field” (pioneered by Nathan A. Scott Jr. et al.) to religion and literature; the affiliated fields of myth criticism, and of biblical reception; and the institutionalization, globalization, and future of the study of religion and literature.

"What brings religious scholars Constance Furey, Sarah Hammerschlag, and Amy Hollywood together in Devotion is a shared conviction that "reading helps us live with and through the unknown." For them, the nature of reading raises questions fundamental to how we think about our political futures and modes of human relation. Each essay suggests different ways to characterize the object of devotion and the stance of the devout subject before it. Furey writes about devotion in terms of vivification, energy, and artifice; Hammerschlag in terms of commentary, mimicry, and fetishism; and Hollywood in terms of anarchy, antinomianism, and atopia. They are interested in literature not as providing models for ethical, political, or religious life, but as creating the site in which the possible-and the impossible-transport the reader, enabling new forms of thought, habits of mind, and modes of life. Ranging from German theologian Martin Luther to French-Jewish philosopher Sarah Kofman to American poet Susan Howe, this volume is not just a reflection on forms of devotion, it is also an enactment of devotion itself"--

This four-volume historical resource provides new opportunities for investigating the relationship between religion, literature and society in Britain and its imperial territories by making accessible a diverse selection of harder-to-find primary sources. These include religious fiction, poetry, essays, memoirs, sermons, travel writing, religious ephemera, unpublished notebooks and pamphlet literature. Spanning the long nineteenth century (c.1789–1914), the resource departs from older models of ‘the Victorian crisis of faith’ in order to open up new ways of conceptualising religion. This second volume is called ‘Mission and Reform’ and it considers the social and political importance of religious faith and practice as expressed through foreign and domestic mission and philanthropic and political movements at home and abroad.

This four-volume historical resource provides new opportunities for investigating the relationship between religion, literature and society in Britain and its imperial territories by making accessible a diverse selection of harder-to-find primary sources. These include religious fiction, poetry, essays, memoirs, sermons, travel writing, religious ephemera, unpublished notebooks and pamphlet literature. Spanning the long nineteenth century (c.1789–1914), the resource departs from older models of ‘the Victorian crisis of faith’ in order to open up new ways of conceptualising religion. This third volume looks at ‘religious feeling’ as an important and distinct category for understanding the ways in which religion is embodied and expressed in culture.

From Flannery O'Connor and James Baldwin to the post-9/11 writings of Don DeLillo, imaginative writers have often been the most insightful chroniclers of the USA's changing religious life since the end of World War II. Exploring a wide range of writers from Protestant, Catholic, Jewish and secular faiths, this book is an in-depth study of contemporary fiction's engagement with religious belief, identity and practice. Through readings of major writers of our time like Saul Bellow, E. L. Doctorow, Philip Roth, Marilynne Robinson and John Updike, Mark Eaton discovers a more nuanced picture of the varieties of American religious experience: that they are more commonplace than cultural ideas of progressive secularisation or faith-based polarization might suggest.