Yothers’ Sacred Uncertainty examines Melville’s engagement with religious difference, both within American culture and around the world. It is impossible to understand Melville’s wider engagement with religious and cultural questions, however, without understanding the fundamental tension between self and society, self and others that underlies his work, and that is manifested in particular in the way in which he interacts with other writers. There is almost certainly no more concrete or reliable way to get at Melville’s affirmations of and arguments with these interlocutors than in the markings and annotations that appear in his copies of many of their works, so Yothers examines Melville’s marginalia for clues to Melville’s thinking about self, other, and difference. Sacred Uncertainty provides a much needed exploration of Melville’s encounter with and reflection upon religious difference.

Product Description: Representing Imperial Rivalry in the Early Modern Mediterranean explores representations of national, racial, and religious identities within a region dominated by the clash of empires. Bringing together studies of English, Spanish, Italian, and Ottoman literature and cultural artifacts, the volume moves from the broadest issues of representation in the Mediterranean to a case study – early modern England – where the “Mediterranean turn” has radically changed the field...read more

Product Description: In Secularization without End: Beckett, Mann, Coetzee, Vincent P. Pecora elaborates an alternative history of the twentieth-century Western novel that explains the resurgence of Christian theological ideas. Standard accounts of secularization in the novel assume the gradual disappearance of religious themes through processes typically described as rationalization: philosophy and science replace faith...read more

The discovery of German Lieutenant Berger's efforts to undermine the Nazi war effort threatens the success of the Allied invasion and jeapordizes the safety of Jannou, Berger's French lover

Religion in Science Fiction investigates the history of the representations of religion in science fiction literature. Space travel, futuristic societies, and non-human cultures are traditional themes in science fiction. Speculating on the societal impacts of as-yet-undiscovered technologies is, after all, one of the distinguishing characteristics of science fiction literature. A more surprising theme may be a parallel exploration of religion: its institutional nature, social functions, and the tensions between religious and scientific worldviews. Steven Hrotic investigates the representations of religion in 19th century proto-science fiction, and genre science fiction from the 1920s through the end of the century. Taken together, he argues that these stories tell an overarching story-a 'metanarrative'-of an evolving respect for religion, paralleling a decline in the belief that science will lead us to an ideal (and religion-free) future.Science fiction's metanarrative represents more than simply a shift in popular perceptions of religion: it also serves as a model for cognitive anthropology, providing new insights into how groups and identities form in a globalized world, and into how crucial a role narratives may play. Ironically, this same perspective suggests that science fiction, as it was in the 20th century, may no longer exist.

James S. Baumlin’s Theologies of Language in English Renaissance Literature offers a revisionist history of discourse, taking Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton as its touchstones. Their works mark stages in dieEntzauberung or “disenchantment,” as Max Weber has termed it: that is, in the “elimination of magic from the world.” Shakespeare’s Hamlet questions the word-magic associated with medieval Catholicism; Donne’s love lyrics ironize the sacramental gestures of their poetic-priestly speakers; more radical still, Milton’s major poems and polemical prose empty language of sacral power, repudiating human persuasion entirely over matters of “saving faith.” Baumlin describes four archetypes of historical rhetoric: sophism, skepticism, incarnationism, and transcendence. Undergirding the age’s competing theologies, each makes unique assumptions regarding the powers of language (both communicative and performative); the nature of being (including transcendent being or deity); the structure of the psyche (whether sin-weakened or self-sufficient); and the capacities of human knowing (whether certain knowledge is communicable—or even possible). Working within divergent theologies of language, the poets here studied take theological controversies as explicit themes. The crisis of Hamlet begins not in a king’s murder simply, but in his dying without benefit of the sacraments. As if compensating for their loss, young Hamlet “minister[s]” to Gertrude while acting as “scourge” to Claudius. Alternating between soul-cursing and soul-curing, Hamlet plays sorcerer and priest indiscriminately.Appropriating the speech-acts of Catholic sacramentalism, Donne’s lyrics describe a private “religion of Love,” over which the poet-lover presides as officiant. Or rather, some lyrics present him as Love’s Priest, there being as many personae as there are theologies of language. Beyond Love’s Priest, Baumlin describes three such personae: Love’s Apostate, Love’s Atheist, and Love’s Reformer. Focusing on “Lycidas” and De Doctrina Christiana, Baumlin outlines Milton’s plerophoristic “rhetoric of certitude.” Such texts as these explore the problematic status of preaching. (Can human eloquence contribute to salvation?) They explore competing definitions (Aristotelian vs. Pauline) of pistis—meaning alternatively (religious) “faith” and (rhetorical) “persuasion.” And they invoke conflicting typologies (classical vs. Hebraic) of authorial ethos. Baumlin’s study ends with a glance at the Restoration and Royal Society’s final “disenchantment” or secularization of discourse.

Product Description: Forgetting to Remember examines the remembrance of the Holocaust in literary texts by six European writers: Paul Celan, Geoffrey Hill, Gunter Grass, Imre Kertesz, Peter Weiss, and Samuel Beckett. Close readings of canonical texts - such as Grass's The Tin Drum and Beckett's Waiting for Godot in conjunction with less well-known works, like Kertesz's Kaddish for a Child Not Born - reveal fresh insights about the ethical and aesthetic challenges of representing the Holocaust...read more

Product Description: Modernist thinkers once presumed a progressive secularity, with the novel replacing religious texts as society’s moral epics. Yet religion—beginning with the Iranian revolution of 1979, through the collapse of communism, and culminating in the singular rupture of September 11, 2001—has not retreated quietly out of sight...read more

Product Description: From the acclaimed cultural historian Philip F. Gura comes Truth's Ragged Edge, a comprehensive and original history of the American novel's first century. Grounded in Gura's extensive consideration of the diverse range of important early novels, not just those that remain widely read today, this book recovers many long-neglected but influential writers―such as the escaped slave Harriet Jacobs, the free black Philadelphian Frank J...read more

Product Description: In the US, multi-cultural and multi-religious experiences have been part of the social fabric for centuries and have often been reflected in American literature. Religious experiences have also become increasingly relevant to the contemporary understandings of modern, multi-cultural, European communities, including those in Norway...read more

Product Description: The essays in this collection examine philosophical, religious, and literary or artistic texts using methodologies and insights that have grown out of reflection on literature and art. In them, them phrase "material spirit" becomes a point of departure for considering the continuing spectral effects of religious texts and concerns in ways that do not simply call for, or assume, new orrenewed forms of religiosity...read more

Product Description: In Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820-1900, Miriam Elizabeth Burstein analyzes the ways in which Christian novelists across the denominational spectrum laid claim to popular genres—most importantly, the religious historical novel—to narrate the aftershocks of 1829, the year of Catholic Emancipation...read more

Product Description: With special attention to the poems For Lancelot Andrewes, Journey of the Magi, and Ash-Wednesday , G. Douglas Atkins offers an exciting new analysis of T.S. Eliot's debt to the seventeenth-century churchman Lancelot Andrewes and his theories of reading and writing texts.

Product Description: A Chastened Communion traces a new path through the well-traversed field of modern Irish poetry by revealing how critical engagement with Catholicism shapes the trajectory of the poetic careers of Austin Clarke, Patrick Kavanagh, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Paul Durcan, and Paula Meehan...read more

Product Description: For years scholars and others have been trying to out Shakespeare as an ardent Calvinist, a crypto-Catholic, a Puritan-baiter, a secularist, or a devotee of some hybrid faith. In Religion Around Shakespeare, Peter Kaufman sets aside such speculation in favor of considering the historic and religious context surrounding his work...read more

Product Description: Erich Auerbach’s seminal Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature was published more than sixty years ago and is deservedly considered a classic. The book brought into focus the fundamental difference that exists between the two basic approaches to the textual representation of reality in Western culture...read more