About this Elements series:

Recent years have seen an explosion of important work on religious currents and counter-currents in modern literature. Elements in Literature and Religion Since 1500 introduces readers to this “religious turn” and the critique of secularism in the humanities, enabling scholars and students alike to grasp literature’s complex negotiations of religion and secularization since the advent of modernity.

This series charts the overlap between religion and literature across the past five centuries and remedies an inattention to religion that has blinkered our understanding of how literature represents and refashions our world. It highlights literature and religion’s shared entanglements with heterodoxy, capitalism, colonialism, and the nation-state, as well as their overlapping concern with abiding human questions, from existence and mortality to crime, forgiveness, flourishing, and the possibilities of love and goodness.

These elegant, accessible volumes, written by an international cadre of world-class scholars, map key debates about the nature of religion and secularization, resituating a familiar western religious landscape by recontextualizing it globally. They expand our understanding not just of the workings of religion in literature but also of the integral role of the literary in religion, providing dynamic resources for scholars and students of religion, theology, and literature.