1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910465526503321

Autore

Douglas Christopher <1968->

Titolo

If God meant to interfere : American literature and the rise of the Christian right / / Christopher Douglas

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Ithaca, [New York] ; ; London, [England] : , : Cornell University Press, , 2016

©2016

ISBN

1-5017-0353-6

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (378 p.)

Disciplina

813/.5409382

Soggetti

American fiction - 20th century - History and criticism

American fiction - 21st century - History and criticism

Christianity in literature

Fundamentalism in literature

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Fiction in the God Gap -- Part One: Multicultural Entanglements -- 1. Multiculturalism, Secularization, Resurgence -- 2. The Poisonwood Bible's Multicultural Graft -- 3. Christian Multiculturalism and Unlearned History in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead -- 4. Recapitulation and Religious Indifference in The Plot Against America -- Part Two: Postmodern Entanglements -- 5. Thomas Pynchon's Prophecy -- 6. Science and Religion in Carl Sagan's Contact -- 7. Evolution and Theodicy in Blood Meridian -- 8. The Postmodern Gospel According to Dan -- Conclusion: Politics, Literature, Method -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

The rise of the Christian Right took many writers and literary critics by surprise, trained as we were to think that religions waned as societies became modern. In If God Meant to Interfere, Christopher Douglas shows that American writers struggled to understand and respond to this new social and political force. Religiously inflected literature since the 1970s must be understood in the context of this unforeseen



resurgence of conservative Christianity, he argues, a resurgence that realigned the literary and cultural fields.Among the writers Douglas considers are Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, N. Scott Momaday, Gloria AnzaldĂșa, Philip Roth, Carl Sagan, and Dan Brown. Their fictions engaged a wide range of topics: religious conspiracies, faith and wonder, slavery and imperialism, evolution and extraterrestrial contact, alternate histories and ancestral spiritualities. But this is only part of the story. Liberal-leaning literary writers responding to the resurgence were sometimes confused by the Christian Right's strange entanglement with the contemporary paradigms of multiculturalism and postmodernism -leading to complex emergent phenomena that Douglas terms "Christian multiculturalism" and "Christian postmodernism." Ultimately, If God Meant to Interfere shows the value of listening to our literature for its sometimes subterranean attention to the religious and social upheavals going on around it.