Literature and Religious Experience: Beyond Belief and Unbelief

✍ Scribed by Matthew J. Smith; Caleb D. Spencer (editors)

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 313
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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

Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Contributors
Reflections and Acknowledgments
Introduction: “The data of our feelings”: Beyond Belief and Unbelief
1 Revelation: Mallarmé and the Negativity of Prophetic Revelation in Modern Literature
2 Blessing: Shakespeare’s Benedictional Designs
3 Longing: Young Geoffrey Hill and the Problem of Religious
4 Interruption: Conversion as an Event in Paul of Tarsus and Paul of Burgos
5 Vision: Building into the Blue
6 Metanoia: Tales of Transformation in Harriet Beecher Stowe and Wendell Berry
7 Belief: Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and James Wood’s The Book Against God
8 Turning: Alabaster’s Wager and the Experience of Conversion
9 Guidance: Understanding Providence in George MacDonald’s Fiction
10 Silence: Kidnapping, Abuse, and Murder in Early-Twenty-First-Century White Evangelical Fiction
11 One: Poetic Love in Ibn .Arabi
12 Humankindness: King Lear and the Suffering, Wisdom, and Compassion within Buddhist Interbeing
13 Gift: The (Im)possible Conditions of Grace in Herman Melville
14 Fantasy: Magical Experiences and Postsecular Fiction
15 Idolatry: Meaning, Power, and “Ideas” of Idolatry in Heart of Darkness and Demian
Afterword
Index