04374nam 2200685 450 991046552650332120200520144314.01-5017-0353-610.7591/9781501703539(CKB)3710000000711544(EBL)4533734(OCoLC)950738868(SSID)ssj0001675018(PQKBManifestationID)16483945(PQKBTitleCode)TC0001675018(PQKBWorkID)14827202(PQKB)11009624(StDuBDS)EDZ0001599457(MiAaPQ)EBC4533734(MdBmJHUP)muse51392(DE-B1597)478478(OCoLC)979581439(DE-B1597)9781501703539(Au-PeEL)EBL4533734(CaPaEBR)ebr11215292(CaONFJC)MIL951814(EXLCZ)99371000000071154420160617h20162016 uy 0engur|n|---|||||txtccrIf God meant to interfere American literature and the rise of the Christian right /Christopher DouglasIthaca, [New York] ;London, [England] :Cornell University Press,2016.©20161 online resource (378 p.)Description based upon print version of record.1-5017-0211-4 Includes bibliographical references and index.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 -- IndexThe 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 Anzaldúa, 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.American fiction20th centuryHistory and criticismAmerican fiction21st centuryHistory and criticismChristianity in literatureFundamentalism in literatureElectronic books.American fictionHistory and criticism.American fictionHistory and criticism.Christianity in literature.Fundamentalism in literature.813/.5409382Douglas Christopher1968-1049565MiAaPQMiAaPQMiAaPQBOOK9910465526503321If God meant to interfere2488116UNINA