Publisher's Synopsis
The central focus of this volume is the 'turn to religion' in modern and postmodern literature, with a special emphasis on the interaction and transformation of both literary and religious canons in contemporary culture. The essays collected here represent different approaches to the literary disclosure of the religious in twentieth-century literature, intersecting with crucial issues in contemporary literary and cultural criticism - issues such as gender, postcolonialism, multiculturalism, ethics, literature and hermeneutics, and trauma theory. The contributors combine a specific theoretical-methodological stance with a case study in which the literary articulation of a (post)modern ethical-religious receptivity for the Other is demonstrated. They explicitly pay attention to the narrative, poetical and rhetorical structures and strategies of the texts - that is, to the tension between representation and performativity.
