Abstract
The interdisciplinary study of religion and literature, begun in the twentieth century by Christian critics such as T.S. Eliot and Helen Gardner, became an established discipline in the United States in the 1950s, and has continued to flourish up to the present day. In this section, I will examine some of the most important work in this area written in the past 20 years. The field is very diverse, and I will be examining the work both of theologians and literary critics, almost all of whom approach the question of the relations between religion and literature in different ways. My purpose is to analyse the ways in which contemporary scholars have argued that literature can be conceived and analysed from the perspective of Christian theology, and to assess the validity of these arguments for the theological literary theory towards which I am working in this book.
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Notes
K. Mills, Justifying Language: Paul and Contemporary Literary Theory (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 2.
B. Ingraffia, Postmodern theory and Biblical Theology: Vanquishing God’s Shadow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 241.
T. Sheehan, ‘Heidegger’s “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion”, 1920–1921’, in A Companion to Martin Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’, ed. J. Kockelmans (Washington: University Press of America, 1986), p. 56.
V. Cunningham, In the Reading Gaol: Postmodemity, Texts, History (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), p. 363.
D. Jasper, Coleridge as Poet and Religious Thinker: Inspiration and Revelation (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985), p. 3.
D. Jasper, The New Testament and the Literary Imagination (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1987), p. 98.
D. Jasper, The Study of Literature and Religion: An Introduction, 2nd edn (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1992), p. 5.
T. Wright, Theology and Literature (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1988), p. 2.
M. Edwards, Towards a Christian Poetics (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), p. 1.
G. Chaucer, ‘The Prologue of the Monk’s Tale’ ll. 1973–1976, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 241.
P. Fiddes, Freedom and Limit: A Dialogue Between Literature and Christian Doctrine (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 5.
R. Detweiler, ‘Theological Trends of Postmodern Fiction’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 44 (1976) 225.
R. Detweiler, Breaking the Fall: Religious Readings of Contemporary Fiction (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 9.
W. Kort, ‘Doing “Religion and Literature” in a Postmodernist Mode’, Christianity and Literature 39 (1990) 195.
R. Detweiler, Uncivil Rites: American Fiction, Religion and the Public Sphere (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), p. 2.
M. Ledbetter, Virtuous Intentions: The Religious Dimension of Narrative (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), p. 1.
See M. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, tr. W. Trask (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959), p. 210.
M. Ledbetter, Victims and the Postmodern Narrative, or, Doing Violence to the Body: An Ethic of Reading and Writing (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1996), p. x.
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© 2003 Luke Ferretter
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Ferretter, L. (2003). Christian Literary Theory. In: Towards a Christian Literary Theory. Cross-Currents in Religion and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230006256_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230006256_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-42788-8
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