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.

Boyle examines influential readings on the Bible as literature--notably Herder, Schleiermacher, Hegel and Levinas--and then applies them to literary writings.

Examining the creative thought that arose in response to 19th-century religious controversies, this book demonstrates that the pressures exerted by historical methods of biblical scholarship prompted an imaginative recovery of wisdom literature. During the Victorian period, new approaches to the interpretation of sacred texts called into question traditional ideas about biblical inspiration, motivating literary transformations of inherited symbols, metaphors, and forms. Drawing on the theoretical work of Paul Ricoeur, Denae Dyck considers how Victorian writers from a variety of belief positions used wisdom literature to reframe their experiences of questioning, doubt, and uncertainty: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George MacDonald, George Eliot, John Ruskin, and Olive Schreiner. This study contributes to the reassessment of historical and contemporary narratives of secularization by calling attention to wisdom literature as a vital, distinctive genre that animated the search for meaning within an increasingly ideologically diverse world.

Is Laurence Sterne one of the great Christian apologists? Ryan Stark recommends him as such, perhaps to the detriment of the parson's roguish reputation. The book's aim, however, is not to dispel roguishness but rather to discern the theological motives behind Sterne's comic rhetoric, from Tristram Shandy and the sermons to A Sentimental Journey. To this end, Stark reveals a veritable avalanche of biblical themes and allusions to be found in Sterne, often and seemingly awkwardly in the middle of sex jokes, and yet the effect is not to produce irreverence. On the contrary, we find an irreverently reverent apologetic, Stark argues, and a priest who knows how to play gracefully with religious ideas. Through Sterne, in fact, we might rethink humour's role in the service of religion.

In the eighteenth century, literature meant learned writings; by the twentieth century, literature had come to be identified with imaginative, aesthetically significant works, and academic literary studies had developed special protocols for interpreting and valuing literary texts. Literature in the Making examines what happened in between: how literature came to be more precisely specified and valued; how it was organized into genres, canons, and national traditions; and how it became the basis for departments of modern languages and literatures in research universities. Modern literature, the version of literature familiar today, was an international invention, but it was forged when literary cultures, traditions, and publishing industries were mainly organized nationally. Literature in the Making examines modern literature's coalescence and institutionalization in the United States, considered as an instructive instance of a phenomenon that was going global. Since modern literature initially offered a way to formulate the value of legacy texts by authors such as Homer, Cervantes, and Shakespeare, however, the development of literature and literary culture in the U.S. was fundamentally transnational. Literature in the Making argues that Shakespeare studies, one of the richest tracts of nineteenth-century U.S. literary culture, was a key domain in which literature came to be valued both for fuelling modern projects and for safeguarding values and practices that modernity put at risk-a foundational paradox that continues to shape literary studies and literary culture. Bringing together the histories of literature's competing conceptualizations, its print infrastructure, its changing status in higher education, and its life in public culture during the long nineteenth century, Literature in the Making offers a robust account of how and why literature mattered then and matters now. By highlighting the lively collaboration between academics and non-academics that prevailed before the ascendancy of the research university starkly divided experts from amateurs, Literature in the Making also opens new possibilities for envisioning how academics might partner with the reading public.

Literary Secularism: Religion and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Fiction shows the path to secularization in the modern novel in comparative perspective. Writers as diverse as George Eliot, James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Taslima Nasrin, and James Wood, have all struggled with religious orthodoxy in their personal lives, and are some of the most important and representative "secular" writers in the modern world canon. But their novels, which are far more than mere anti-religious manifestos, directly reflect the continued power of religious communities and institutions in the modern world. While religion is in a very real sense displaced from epistemological centrality in modernity, all of these writers suggest that religious texts, rituals, and communities have a force that is, in George Eliot's words, “still throbbing” in modern life. In a series of close readings, Literary Secularism argues that the intimate, often deeply ambivalent representation of religion is a key feature of modern writing and is central to the larger intellectual and historical project of modernity. "Literary Secularism" is then a complex literary ethos, which impinges as much on style, language, and novelistic form as on theme. The close readings here of novels such as George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Rabindranath Tagore's Gora, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses all hinge on the ambiguity of religious and secular discourses. In some cases, the ambiguity is expressed through the affective and embodied experience of the protagonists, whose private subjectivity often conflicts with their public identities. The conflict between present and private is also explored in a dedicated chapter on secularism and feminism in India, as well as with regard to the global crisis of secularism that has emerged following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. While the particular experiences of the various narratives vary somewhat from author to author, all of the authors in this study are interested in defining a way of being secular that no sociological or ideological formula can fully describe. Correspondingly, while works of literature are certainly artifacts marking key moments in the history of secularisation, literature by itself doesn't produce secularism in either the cultural or the political context. In arguing for the "literary" as a historically-specific social and cultural mode of secularity, Literary Secularism offers a unique perspective on the problem of secularisation that may be of interest to fields such as literary criticism, religious studies, the sociology of religion, and polticial theory.

In an era of rampant Islamophobia, what do literary representations of Muslims and anti-Muslim bigotry tell us about changing concepts of cultural difference? In Islamophobia and the Novel, Peter Morey analyzes how recent works of fiction have framed and responded to the rise of anti-Muslim prejudice, showing how their portrayals of Muslims both reflect and refute the ideological preoccupations of media and politicians in the post-9/11 West. Islamophobia and the Novel discusses novels embodying a range of positions—from the avowedly secular to the religious, and from texts that appear to underwrite Western assumptions of cultural superiority to those that recognize and critique neoimperial impulses. Morey offers nuanced readings of works by John Updike, Ian McEwan, Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, Mohsin Hamid, John le Carré, Khaled Hosseini, Azar Nafisi, and other writers, emphasizing the demands of the literary marketplace for representations of Muslims. He explores how depictions of Muslim experience have challenged liberal assumptions regarding the novel’s potential for empathy and its ability to encompass a variety of voices. Morey argues for a greater degree of critical self-consciousness in our understanding of writing by and about Muslims, in contrast to both exclusionary nationalism and the fetishization of difference. Contemporary literature’s capacity to unveil the conflicted nature of anti-Muslim bigotry expands our range of resources to combat Islamophobia. This, in turn, might contribute to Islamophobia’s eventual dismantling.