Book Review: Spiritual Identities: Literature and the Post-Secular Imagination

Abstract

Spiritual Identities: Literature and Post-Secular Imagination. Edited by Jo Carruthers and Andrew Tate. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2010. Vol. 17 of Cultural Interactions: Studies in Relationship Between Arts. ISBN 978-03911-925-7. Pp. vi + 231. $58.95. The Peter Lang series, Cultural Interactions: Studies in Relationship Between Arts, of which this volume is a part, directs its attention to forging new relationships between arts, expanding their interdisciplinary possibilities. Spiritual Identities serves this purpose well, emphasizing fresh perspectives on role of the religious in contemporary literary (1). Those who dispute nineteenth-century claims that religion was no more than a relic of unscientific thinking will be heartened by articles in this volume, which start from perspective, reminiscent of Rudolf Otto, Mircea Eliade, and others, that the religious is increasingly revealed as an irreducible category of thought, feeling, experience and imagination which can never be explained away and with which we will always have to reckon (1). In recognizing importance of contemporary religious yearnings, editors maintain that 'cracks' into which religious impulses flow in a world without religion are nothing other than space of literature itself: literature is neither an alternative to, nor a substitute for religion, but a way in which religious experience can happen (5). All of essays in volume, then, invite readers to rethink and reimagine persistence of religious ideas, questions, and influences on lives and works of a wide variety of authors and literary works. The essays in this volume are wide-ranging, some more illuminating than others. The essays in volume which seem least successful at highlighting a contemporary return to recognition of religious impulses in art are those focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors and their works. Essays by Nancy Jiwon Cho and Emma Mason that investigate work of lesser-known writers, like eighteenth-century devotional writer Susanna Harrison, and poets Anne Barbauld and Felicia Hemans, do helpfully underscore ways that these women negotiated their identities as writers by using, in various ways, their relationships with and commitments to both traditional and dissenting forms of Christianity. But Brian Ingram's essay on George Eliot's early Evangelicalism and Simon Marsdon's piece on spiritualized landscape of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights cover already analyzed territory. And although Andy Mousley's essay on spiritual humanisms focuses on more recent writers, in using work of Martin Luther King to create a dialogue between Walter Benjamin and Julia Kristeva, essay takes up so many aspects of these writers' work that it fails to bring its point home clearly. The essays that have more promise for thinking about religious in contemporary literary studies are those that specifically engage newer works of literature, underscoring ways in which religious impulses cut across, undermine, and reformulate traditional, dichotomous ways of thinking. …