Theology and Literature Rethinking Reader Responsibility [Hardcover]

By examining theological and literary narratives through an engagement with well-known theorists of reading and religion, this collection of essays, international in perspective, brings together varied, refreshing and provocative responses to well-established literary and critical theories.On Reader Responsibility: An Introduction; C.A.B.Joseph & G.W.Ortiz A Theory of Ethical Reading Some Dilemmas of an Ethics of Literature; L.K.Altes Reading and the Biblical Only Irresponsible People Would Go into the Desert for Forty Days: Jim Crace's Quarantine or The Diary of Another Madman; D.Jasper The Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: Rhetoricizing the Foundations; R.J.Hurley Samuel Beckett's Use of the Bible and the Responsibility of the Reader; S.Athanasopoulou-Kypriou On Trial: Mikhail Bakhtin and Abram Tertz's Address to 'God'; L.Owens Bible and Ethics: Moral Formation and Analogical Imagination; J.Nissen Reading and the Literary The Playwright, the Novelist, and the Comedian: A Case Study in Audience Responsibility; D.Visser Dialogue in Gandhi's Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule or the Reader as Truth-Seeker; C.A.B.Joseph Responsibly Performing Vulnerability: Salman Rushdie's Fury and Edgar Laurence Doctorow's City of God; E.Borgman The Indian Character of Modern Hindi Drama: Neo-Sanskritic, Pro-Western Naturalistic, or Natavistic Dramas?; D.Dimitrova Apocryphal Imitation of the Feminine - Judith of Bethulia ; E.Philpot Revolting Fantasies: Reviewing the Cinematic Image as Fruitful Ground for Creative Theological Interpretations in the Company of Julia Kristeva; A.Jasper Literature as Resistance: Hannah Arendt on Storytelling; D.De Schutter

Theology needs the literary imagination and, indeed, will not survive without it. However, a responsible imagination is never imagination for imagination's sake, for it is connected to the gendered, ethnic, class, national, and postcolonial realities of identity, of real people living in the world. The essays collected hlÓo