Introduction

Abstract

Most contemporary literary theories are atheistic. In ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968), Roland Barthes describes the emphasis on textuality characteristic of post-structuralism as ‘an anti-theological activity…since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases reason, science, law’.¹ The philosophers to whom modern literary theory is most indebted — Marx, Nietzsche and Freud — have argued that the truth-content of religious beliefs is negated by their social and psychological determinants. Post-structuralist theories emphasize that the language in which such beliefs are expressed cannot support the truth-claim that they imply. It seems that contemporary literary study is incompatible as such with Christian faith. This book argues that this is not the case.