Theology and Literature after Postmodernity

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This volume deploys theology in a reconstructive approach to contemporary literary criticism, to validate and exemplify theological readings of literary texts as a creative exercise. It engages in a dialogue with interdisciplinary approaches to literature in which theology is alert and responsive to the challenges following postmodernism and postmodern literary criticism. It demonstrates the scope and explanatory power of theological readings across various texts and literary genres. Theology and Literature after Postmodernity explores a reconstructive approach to reading and literary study in the university setting, with contributions from interdisciplinary scholars worldwide.

Reviews

Of the contributions to this volume John Milton might well have exclaimed, "O how comely it is, and how reviving to the spirits of just men long oppressed" by the "disciplinary division and animosity in the modern university between Literature and Theology" ... For here is a book advocating a revolutionary breach of the old established boundaries between the two above-mentioned disciplines in favour of a theological approach to literature and a literary approach to theology. -- Peter Milward, Sophia University, Tokyo * Heythrop Journal *
This fine collection features some of the liveliest minds at work in Anglophone literary and theological study. They avoid the postmodernist denial of any transcendent basis for such binaries as belief and unbelief, time and eternity, comedy and tragedy. Instead, they unite such contraries within a complex and difficult tension that identifies both the absence and presence of God in a secular age such as ours. They do so by fresh readings of figures which range from Augustine and Gregory the Great to Dante and Nicholas of Cusa, from Shakespeare and Wordsworth to Graham Greene and R. S. Thomas, on to Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling. Here is a veritable feast for body and soul, mind and heart alike. * Ralph C. Wood, Baylor University, USA *
Theology and Literature after Postmodernity brings us an intelligently provocative set of essays. To read them all is to have ones sense of the possible interactions of theology and literature greatly expanded. The essays provide many insightful, even brilliant, readings of texts, but their greater contribution is to lay paths for future scholarship, for those who have the courage and resourcefulness to follow * Alan Jacobs, Wheaton College, USA *
The aim of this volume, the editors make clear, is to create a hospitable space where theological and literary texts, and those who read, write and discuss them, can converse creatively and openly. Hospitality implies food offered to a guest. We receive a banquet here: a rich variety of remarkably thought-provoking essays, with something for every taste. It is one of those all-you-can-eat banquets, as each dish (or chapter) invites and repays multiple tastings. Hospitality also creates an abiding debt of gratitude to the host; and certainly, I closed this book conscious, not only of a sense of fullness and well-being, but of a debt to all who hosted me as I read their works. * Gregory Seach, University of Cambridge, UK *
Reveals the need for an ongoing interdisciplinary exploration of literature and theology. This collection shows that there is not one, single way to approach literature and theology; the collections wide approach is thus, a major strength of the work. I recommend Theology and Literature After Postmodernity to theologians, literary critics, and anyone interested in imagining a welcoming space of future possibilities reclaimed by theology and literature (10). * Reading Religion *

Author Bio

Zo Lehmann Imfeld is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Peter Hampson is a Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford, UK. Alison Milbank is Associate Professor in Literature and Theology at the University of Nottingham, UK.