Table Of ContentReligion, 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.
