Abstract
This Cambridge Companion is a rich resource for any reader who wants to understand better the relationship between religion and literature in their multiple iterations. Not claiming to be an exhaustive survey of the field, it is nevertheless carefully structured to offer a wide range of views and possibilities, in terms of texts and religious approaches discussed. Each contribution reflects on a specific topic, takes religious and literary concerns seriously and, crucially, offers a reading of at least one literary text in the light of the discussion. The connection with a literary text and with a religious tradition in each chapter is a powerfully attractive structure which generates meaningful debate throughout the book.
After a full introduction by Susan M. Felch, Part 1 is made up of three chapters which discuss specific reading practices: theological; confessional; postsecular. In Part 2, five topics of importance in literary and religious worlds are explored: ethics, dwelling, imagination, sacrifice and repetition. In Part 3, the focus widens from the Abrahamic, and mainly Christian traditions, to include Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism and Islam, as well as Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism and World Christianity. Here, from ‘inside’ the various traditions, new interpretations of the interaction between religion and literature are offered.
Literary texts covered include Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (in James Matthew Wilson’s ‘Confessional Reading’); Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy (in Zhange Ni’s ‘Postsecular Reading’); Shakespeare’s Pericles in relation to the Book of Jonah (in Julia Reinhard Lupton’s ‘Dwelling’); Toni Morrison’s Beloved (in Matthew Potts’s ‘Imagination’); Flannery O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’ (in Michon M. Matthiesen’s ‘Sacrifice’); Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (in Lori Branch and Ioana Patuleanu’s ‘Eastern Orthodoxy’); and Ibn al-Farid’s The Wine Ode and Muhammad Iqbal’s Satan’s Advisory Council (in Mustansir Mir’s ‘Islam’). The range is wide but most readers will find familiar points of connection which will interest them, and discussions of new texts which will be enlightening.
Of particular note is Rowan Williams’s chapter, ‘Theological Reading’, a discussion of three contemporary plays which ‘suggest some of the areas in which religious believing and belonging continue to attract, repel, challenge, and baffle a secular culture’ (p. 22). These are David Edgar’s Written on the Heart, Mick Gordon and A. C. Grayling’s On Religion and Alexi Kaye Campbell’s The Faith Machine. The chapter elegantly compares the ways in which these plays suggest a ‘theologically informed world’ which is both familiar and alien and which speaks to us of ‘belonging’ in its widest sense (p. 33).
This book is highly recommended for readers who want to engage deeply in this broad field.