Is There a Context for Gilead? Reading The Handmaid's Tale and Lila under the Christian Right

Studies of literature and the Christian Right, like most studies of literature and religion, tend to operate under what Joseph North has recently called the "historicist/contextualist" paradigm of literary study. Departing from that consensus, this essay examines two novels germane to the study of the Christian Right—Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Marilynne Robinson's Lila—not to demonstrate their embeddedness in historical context, but to illustrate how their narratives imagine reading, belief, and perception in ways that reassert the value of literary criticism at a time when the Christian Right has attained unprecedented political power.