Books in the New Directions in Religion and Literature series

Examines how Richard Dawkins' so-called 'New Atheism' movement has caught the imagination of four eminent modern novelists: Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Philip Pullman. This title offers a genealogy of the "New Atheist Novel": where it comes from, what needs it serves and, most importantly, where it may go in the future.

William Franke reads Dante's poetic language in the Paradiso in the light of contemporary critical theory by such thinkers as Derrida, Blanchot and Bataille.

The history of responses to the works of William Wordsworth and William Blake can be divided into those who have tried to enact their poetry, and those who have tried to categorize it. This book argues that not only are both valid, but the conflict between them is staged in the poetry of both Blake and Wordsworth.

Explores the life and thought of Walter Benjamin, imaginatively examining its implications in the political context of a post-War London estate. This title explores the emergence of Benjamin's thinking from a politicised Jewish theology forced to confront the rise of Nazism.

Bringing together new accounts of the pulp horror writings of H.P. Lovecraft and the rise of the popular early 20th-century religious movements of American Pentecostalism and Social Gospel, Pentecostal Modernism challenges traditional histories of modernism as a secular avant-garde movement based in capital cities such as London or Paris. Disrupting accounts that separate religion from progressive social movements and mass culture, Stephen Shapiro and Philip Barnard construct a new Modernism belonging to a history of regional cities, new urban areas powered by the hopes and frustrations of recently urbanized populations seeking a better life. In this way, Pentecostal Modernism shows how this process of urbanization generates new cultural practices including the invention of religious traditions and mass-cultural forms.

"Traces how eminent writers--including Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde--wrestled with the religious and social meanings of forgiveness in an age of theological controversy and increasing ethical pluralism."--Back cover.

Offers a critical study of the reinscription of biblical parables in Victorian realist fiction. The author shows that authors such as Charles Dickens, Margaret Oliphant, and Charlotte Yonge appreciated the power of parables to deliver an ethical charge that was as unexpected as it was disruptive to conventional moral complacency.

By outlining Protestantism and Englishness in early-modern literature to the present-day, this study reveals how other religious identities can be alienated in British society. It seeks to trace English Islamophobia to its roots in England's Protestant past, and more specifically to its aesthetic and literary rooting in Protestant values.

From their earliest days, Superheroes have engaged with some of the most profound spiritual questions that a human being can face: What does it mean to be good? Why is there evil? This book looks at the modern Superhero comic as an expression of spiritual desire, showing what Superheroes can teach about our most essential human needs.