Literary History and the Religious Turn

44.1, Spring/Summer 2006
Bruce Holsinger, editor

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This inaugural volume of the new ELN takes on the so-called Religious Turn over the last decade in the study of literary history. As Stanley Fish remarked in a widely-cited piece published early in 2005, the academic study of religionis now 鈥渨here the action is鈥濃攁ction that appears unlikely to diminish in intensity for quite a while. Many of the present contributors would probably object that this putative religious turn is actually more of a swerve, the explicit and self-conscious dimension of an enduring religious preoccupation among theorists, historians, and critics of literary production. One of Fish鈥檚 early books, after all, was Surprised by Sin, and much of Derrida鈥檚 writing beginning in the early 1990s both adumbrated and embodied the wider religious turn in critical and cultural theory. As Nicholas Watson and other contributors to our cluster on 鈥渧ernacular theology鈥 suggest, moreover, theology has, mutatis mutandis, been at the center of medieval literary studies for half a century. 鈥淟iterary History and the Religious Turn,鈥 then, takes up one of the most undeniably pressing of current issues in a variety of fields within the humanities.

 

In This Issue
  • 鈥淰ernacular Theology鈥 and Medieval Studies
  • Renaissance Religiosities
  • Writing Salvation: The Religious Turn in Contemporary Latina Fiction
  • Contemporary Poetics and the New Spirituality
  • Film Theory and Mel Gibson鈥檚 鈥淭he Passion of the Christ鈥
  • and more