Product Description: Michel Houellebecq is France’s most famous and controversial living novelist. Since his first novel in 1994, Houellebecq’s work has been called pornographic, racist, sexist, Islamophobic, and vulgar. His caricature appeared on the cover of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015, the day that Islamist militants killed twelve people in an attack on their offices and also the day that his most recent novel, Soumission—the story of France in 2022 under a Muslim president—appeared in bookstores...read more

Product Description: Unorthodox Beauty shows how Russian poets of the early twentieth century consciously adapted Russian Orthodox culture in order to create a distinctly religious modernism. Martha M. F. Kelly contends that, beyond mere themes, these writers developed an entire poetics that drew on liturgical tradition...read more

Product Description: Examining the roots of the relationship between literature and theology, this book offers the first serious attempt to probe the deep theological purposes of the study of literature. Through an exploration of themes of evil, forgiveness, sacrament and what it means to be human, David Jasper draws from international research and discussions on literature and theology and employs an historical and profoundly personal journey through the later part of the last century up to the present time...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: Dickens's social criticism is one of the most famous and important aspects of his works. This book explores the centrality of his religious attitudes to his attacks on the social ills of his day. After discussing how deeply engaged Dickens was with his religion, the author links him to a group of political and religious campaigners who were pioneering the application of Christian moral precepts to social issues...read more

Excursions with Thoreau is a major new exploration of Thoreau's writing and thought that is philosophical yet sensitive to the literary and religious. Edward F. Mooney's excursions through passages from Walden, Cape Cod, and his late essay “Walking” reveal Thoreau as a miraculous writer, artist, and religious adept. Of course Thoreau remains the familiar political activist and environmental philosopher, but in these fifteen excursions we discover new terrain. Among the notable themes that emerge are Thoreau's grappling with underlying affliction; his pursuit of wonder as ameliorating affliction; his use of the enigmatic image of “a child of the mist”; his exalting “sympathy with intelligence” over plain knowledge; and his preferring “befitting reverie”-not argument-as the way to be carried to better, cleaner perceptions of reality. Mooney's aim is bring alive Thoreau's moments of reverie and insight, and to frame his philosophy as poetic and episodic rather than discursive and systematic.

Product Description: Liturgy and literature have had a complex historical relationship. This applies equally to theculture of the Middle Ages, so heavily influenced by Christianity, as well as to the modern era. This book studies exemplary cases from a range of disciplines (linguistics, literary studies, history, philosophy, and theology) to illuminate overlap and disjunction between the two domains...read more

By his national affiliation and choice of genre, French novelist Gustave Flaubert can be considered emblematic of modernity. This book showcases his specific and highly refined imaginary as at once unique and symptomatic of an era. In particular, it contributes to the controversial discussion of modernity's relation to religion. At a time when new religious fundamentalisms throughout the world are on the rise, this has only become a more pressing issue. Through this single acclaimed author, we realize that modernity can only be understood in terms of its critical rewriting of religious dogma. Strikingly, already in Flaubert, this rewriting emerges in conjunction with questions of the Orient and Orientalism. Flaubert's Orient is an Other that is always already within Western society. By highlighting the complexity of the relation between religion, modernity, and the Oriental, Barbara Vinken's discussion of these issues goes beyond simple binaries. Her Flaubert Postsecular is a model of scholarly research with far-reaching political implications.

Product Description: In The Revelation of Imagination, William Franke attempts to focus on what is enduring and perennial rather than on what is accommodated to the agenda of the moment. Franke’s book offers re-actualized readings of representative texts from the Bible, Homer, and Virgil to Augustine and Dante...read more

Product Description: In the first book to consider the study of world religion and world literature in concert, Zhange Ni proposes a new reading strategy that she calls "pagan criticism," which she applies not only to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century literary texts that engage the global resurgence of religion but also to the very concepts of religion and the secular...read more

Product Description: Readers of Emily Brontë's poetry and of Wuthering Heights have seen in their author, variously, a devout if somewhat unorthodox Christian, a heretic, or a visionary "mystic of the moors". Rather than seeking to resolve this matter, Emily Brontë and the Religious Imagination suggests that such conflicting readings are the product of tensions, conflicts and ambiguities within the texts themselves...read more

Because he spends his time dreaming, the villagers are convinced that Appelemando will never amount to much but in time his dreams change the village and all the people in it