The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion ed. by Mark Knight (review)

In the last dozen or so years, a wellspring of scholarly work has renewed the field of religion and literature. The diverse essays collected in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion offers a welcome addition to previous anthologies like The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology (2007), The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Religion (2016), and the special issue of Religion and Literature 41.2 (2009). Like the latter two, The Routledge Companion represents an array of faith traditions; as a whole, it offer an excellent overview of this rich and variegated field of study.

To speak of “religion and literature” as a unified field is perennially problematic: the conjunction “and” can seem to bind the disciplines loosely. As convener of the conversations that made this volume possible, editor Mark Knight navigates the terrain deftly, ever aware of “fluidity and movement between the disciplines” (4). Lori Branch’s “Postsecular Studies” complements Knight’s introductory essay by providing a detailed review of studies in religion and literature over the last 25 years. “[B]oth descriptive and proscriptive,” Branch’s overview “testifies to a fertile field under significant cultivation” (92). She recognizes the academy’s suspicion toward religion, and that most active literary scholars “were trained after 1970 in methodologies that assumed the truth of the secularization thesis” (93). As Tracy Fessenden wrote in 2007, “Of all the binaries to which critical suspicion directs our critical scrutiny, the secular/religious binary is last to yield to critical pressure because it lies closest to the heart of professional identity” (93). Postsecular studies—represented widely in this anthology—has done much to complicate this recalcitrant binary.

Knight’s division of the 39 essays into five parts clarifies the complexity of the field’s contemporary “state of play,” and this brief review will point to salient examples from each section. Part I tells “The Modern Story of Literature and Religion,” commencing with Joshua King’s analysis of Matthew Arnold’s 1880 prophecy that “most of what now passes with us as religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry” (15). Arnold believed that his call for “an inward turn” would provide the impetus for “the ethical resurrection into moral life” (22). In the years that followed, Arnold seemed to have been prescient: “the rise of English studies” proved inhospitable to religion, as Dayton Haskin observes in his essay. But one Harvard graduate, Thomas Stearns Eliot, swam against the stream, and his “theological modernism” insisted that “‘all manner of thing shall be well,’ but only when seen from the perspective of Christian salvation history” (Anthony Domestico, 45). C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien agreed, and their “literary achievement is contingent upon its mythic penetration to the heart of the Christian evangel” (Trevor Hart, 55).

Part II focuses upon “Theory” and includes Kevin Hart’s essay on the renewed interest in “Phenomenology,” here applied to the poetry of George Oppen, and William Franke’s on the resurgent attention to the Apostle Paul by theoreticians like Badiou, Agamben, and Žižek. Jens Zimmerman helpfully reminds readers of “The Importance of Philosophical Hermeneutics for Literature and Religion.” Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1969) receives a well-warranted re-appreciation for its “thesis that all human knowing is a form of interpretation, wherefore neither religion nor science can claim absolute certain knowledge” (103) and Gadamer’s insistence that “reading texts with enduring insights . . . is always transformative in the same way that a conversation with another human being can be transformative” (109). As someone who has taught “great books” curricula for almost 30 years, I concur: the attentive, collaborative study of classic texts—so many of which grapple with religious questions—can play a vital role in a student’s formation.

In part III, a focus upon “Form and Genre” commences with the indispensable Stanley Hauerwas, who makes a persuasive case that “a theological sentence that does its proper work does so just...