Religious Perspectives

Abstract

Let me begin this chapter by acknowledging a personal difficulty (not, I feel certain, confined to me) in engaging with a particular kind of apparently serious critical analysis of the relationship between literature and religion. There are several kinds of analyses that could be mentioned here before I clarify what that particular kind of analysis is. Substantial critical effort has been devoted to examining the manner in which specific religious institutional forms and religious ideologies have impinged upon the production and reception of literary works in different cultures and historical periods. Insofar as it is given that the religious institutions and convictions are such as they are or are such as they have come to be, and the analysis follows from that background, these are generally illuminating and useful in various ways. Considerable critical attention has been devoted to clarifying how religious concerns and issues figure implicitly or explicitly in literary works, or genres, or the literature of certain periods and contexts. Sometimes texts that are allocated an extra-literary and ahistorical religious significance in some context or the other — those purporting to be divine revelations, for instance — may nevertheless be historicized and critically analysed as literature; and the very allocation of religious significance can be assessed as a peculiar variety of literary reception.