Victims and the Postmodern Narrative suggests that reading and writing about literature are ways to gain an ethical understanding of how we live in the world. Postmodern narrative is an important way to reveal and discuss who are society's victims, inviting the reader to become one with them. A close reading of fiction by Toni Morrison, Patrick Suskind, D.M. Thomas, Ian McEwan and J.M. Coetzee reveals a violence imposed on gender, race and the body-politic. Such violence is not new to the postmodern world, but merely reflects Western culture's religious traditions, as the author demonstrates through a reading of stories from the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament.

The articles investigate representations in literature, both by the colonizers and colonized. Many deal with the effect the dominant culture had on the self image of native inhabitants. They cover areas on all continents that were colonized by European countries.

This book situates the discourse on the gendered body within the rapidly transitioning South Asian socio-economic and cultural landscape. It critically analyzes gender politics from different disciplinary perspectives including psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, post-colonialism and law among others. Enriched by contributions from well-known South Asian feminist scholars, this book discusses themes such as democracy and dissent, citizenship and violence and how the female body has historically been used in these discussions as a shield and a weapon. It also focuses on technology and misogyny, the politics of veiling and unveiling, the body of the Muslim women in contemporary India as well as bodies which are marginalized or labelled transgressive or monstrous. The chapters in the volume showcase the complexities, convergences and divergences which exist in the conception and understanding of the gendered body, sexuality and gender roles in different socio-cultural spaces in South Asia and how women negotiate these boundaries. Topical and comprehensive, this book will be useful for scholars and researchers of gender studies, sociology, political sociology, social anthropology, cultural studies, post-colonial studies and South Asian studies.

How fictional representations of dead bodies develop over the twentieth century is the central concern of Lisa K. Perdigao's study of American writers. Arguing that the crisis of bodily representation can be traced in the move from modernist entombment to postmodernist exhumation, Perdigao considers how works by writers from F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, and Richard Wright to Jody Shields, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Jeffrey Eugenides reflect changing attitudes about dying, death, and mourning. For example, while modernist writers direct their plots toward a transformation of the dead body by way of metaphor, postmodernist writers exhume the transformed body, reasserting its materiality. Rather than viewing these tropes in oppositional terms, Perdigao examines the implications for narrative of the authors' apparently contradictory attempts to recover meaning at the site of loss. She argues that entombment and exhumation are complementary drives that speak to the tension between the desire to bury the dead and the need to remember, indicating shifts in critical discussions about the body and about the function of aesthetics in relation to materialized violence and loss.

In Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel Andrew Gibson sets out to demonstrate that postmodern theory has actually made possible an ethical discourse around fiction. Each chapter elaborates and discusses a particular aspect of Levinas' thought and raises questions for that thought and its bearing on the novel. It also contains detailed analyses of particular texts. Part of the book's originality is its concentration on a range of modernist and postmodern novels which have seldom if ever served as the basis for a larger ethical theory of fiction. Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel discusses among others the writings of Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Jane Austen, Samuel Beckett, Marcel Proust and Salman Rushdie.

Ian McEwan is one of Britain's most established, and controversial, writers. This book introduces students to a range of critical approaches to McEwan's fiction. Criticism is drawn from selections in academic essays and articles, and reviews in newspapers, journals, magazines and websites, with editorial comment providing context, drawing attention to key points and identifying differences in critical perspectives. The book features selections from published interviews with Ian McEwan and covers all of the writer's novels to date, including his latest novel Saturday.

The sacrament par excellence, the Eucharist, has been upheld as the foundational sacrament of Christ's Body called Church, yet it has confounded Christian thinking and practice throughout history. Its symbolism points to the paradox of the incarnation, death, and resurrection of God in Jesus of Nazareth, which St. Paul describes as a stumbling-block (skandalon). Yet the scandal of sacramentality, not only illustrated by but enacted in the Eucharist, has not been sufficiently accounted for in the ecclesiologies and sacramental theologies of the Christian tradition. Despite what appears to be an increasingly post-ecclesial world, sacrament remains a persistent theme in contemporary culture, often in places least expected. Drawing upon the biblical image of "the Word made flesh," this interdisciplinary study examines the scandal of sacramentality along the twofold thematic of the scandal of language (word) and the scandal of the body (flesh). While sacred theology can think through this scandal only at significant risk to its own stability, the fictional discourses of literature and the arts are free to explore this scandal in a manner that simultaneously augments and challenges traditional notions of sacrament and sacramentality, and by extension, what it means to describe the Church as a "eucharistic community."