Religion, literature and the imagination : sacred worlds PDF
Preview Religion, literature and the imagination : sacred worlds
Religion, Literature and the Imagination Continuum Literary Studies Related titles in the series: Contemporary Fiction and Christianity, Andrew Tate Ecstasy and Understanding, edited by Adrian Grafe Religion, Literature and the Imagination Sacred Worlds Edited by Mark Knight and Louise Lee Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Mark Knight, Louise Lee and contributors 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-8470-6417-2 (hardback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group Contents Acknowledgements vii Notes on Contributors viii 1. Introduction 1 Mark Knight and Louise Lee 2. Notes toward a Supreme Addiction: The Theology Fiction of William Blake and Philip K. Dick 8 Geoffrey Hartman 3. God’s Little Mountains: Young Geoffrey Hill and the Problem of Religious Poetry 23 Kevin Hart 4. Religion, Truth and the ‘New Aestheticism’ 37 Robert Eaglestone 5. The Deconstruction of Christianity: From the Hand of God to the Hand of Man 47 Arthur Bradley 6. Deity in Dispatches: The Crimean Beginnings of Muscular Christianity 57 Louise Lee 7. Israel Zangwill, Jewish Identity and Visceral Religion 75 Jo Carruthers 8. I Am Not Walter Benjamin 87 John Schad 9. ‘The Oldest Dream of All’: Heaven in Contemporary Fiction 106 Andrew Tate vi Contents 10. De Quincey’s Uses of the Bible: Biblical Time and Psychological Time 123 Jonathan Roberts 11. Re-imagining Biblical Exegesis 140 Christopher Rowland 12. Saving Literary Criticism 150 Mark Knight and Emma Mason Notes 162 Index 187 Acknowledgements This volume emerged from a conference on religion and literature at Roehampton University in October 2007 and we would like to thank everyone who participated in that event and made it such an enjoyable occasion. Thanks also go to John, Georgie, Jo and Sam for their patience and forbearance as we worked on this collection. ‘Tea at the Palaz of Hoon’, from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens by Wallace Stevens, copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. ‘God’s little Mountain’ (16 lines) and 11 lines from ‘Genesis’ originally published in For the Unfallen taken from Selected Poems by Geoffrey Hill (Penguin books, 2006). Copyright © Geoffrey Hill, 1959, 2006. Excerpts from ‘God’s Little Mountain’ and ‘Genesis’ from New & Collected Poems, 1952–1992 by Geoffrey Hill. Copyright © 1994 by Geoffrey Hill. Reprinted by permissions of Houghton Miffl in Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Notes on Contributors Arthur Bradley is a senior lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. He is the author of Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy (2004), Derrida’s Of Grammatology: A Philosophical Guide (2008) and (with Andrew Tate), The New Atheist Novel: Fiction, Philosophy and Polemic after 9/11 (forthcoming, 2010), as well as numerous essays on continental philosophy, cultural theory and literature. He is currently working on a book entitled Originary Technicity: Continental Philosophy of Technology from Marx to Derrida. Jo Carruthers holds a joint position in the Department of English and the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Bristol, where she is a Research Councils UK Academic Fellow. Her research inter- ests include reception theory, the Book of Esther and the festival of Purim, and the nexus of religious and national identity and literature. She has published various articles on these subjects and is the author of Esther Through the Centuries (2007). Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published on a range of issues and writers in contemporary philosophy and literature, and on literary theory, historiography and the Holocaust. He is the Series Editor of Routledge Critical Thinkers. Kevin Hart holds the Edwin B. Kyle Chair in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, where he also holds courtesy professor- ships in the Departments of English and French. His most recent books are The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago University Press) and Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion (Notre Dame University Press). He is the author of several volumes of poetry, the most recent being Flame Tree: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe) and Young Rain (Bloodaxe). Geoffrey Hartman is Sterling Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Scholar of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University. Among his many books are The Unmediated Vision (1954), Wordsworth’s Poetry (1964), Notes on Contributors ix Beyond Formalism (1970), Saving the Text (1981), The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (1996), Scars of the Spirit (2002) and The Geoffrey Hartman Reader (2004), winner of the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism. His most recent book is A Scholar’s Tale (2007), an intellectual memoir. Mark Knight is Reader in English Literature at Roehampton University. He is the author of Chesterton and Evil (2004), Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (co-written with Emma Mason, 2006), Biblical Reli- gion and the Novel: 1700–2000 (co-edited with Thomas Woodman, 2006) and An Introduction to Religion and Literature (2009). His next book is provision- ally entitled Good Words: Evangelicalism and the Development of the Nineteenth- Century Novel. With Emma Mason, he is joint series editor of New Directions in Religion and Literature (Continuum). Louise Lee recently completed a PhD at Roehampton University on Charles Kingsley and the politics of authorship. She is now a British Academy Post- doctoral Fellow at King’s College London, researching late Victorian fi c- tion and nineteenth-century scientifi c accounts of laughter. Emma Mason is a senior lecturer in the Department of English and Com- parative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (2006) and The Cambridge Introduction to Wordsworth (2010); and a co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature (2009) and The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible (2010). She has previously collaborated with Mark Knight on N ineteenth- Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (2006). Jonathan Roberts is a lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of William Blake’s Poetry (2007), The Bible for Sinners (with Christopher Rowland, 2008), and the forthcoming Blake. Wordsworth. Religion (2010). He is also co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature (2009) and The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible (2010). Christopher Rowland is Dean Ireland Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture in the University of Oxford. He has pioneered attempts to encourage reception history by setting up the Centre for the Reception History of the Bible in Oxford and writing on the history of interpretation of the Book of Revelation and the effects of Ezekiel’s merkabah vision in Christianity. He is at present completing books on early Jewish mysticism and the interpretation of the New Testament and William Blake’s biblical hermeneutics.
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