Literary Canons and Religious Identity

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 represent different approaches to the literary disclosure of the religious in 20th-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.