Contemporary Christian critique often talks about postmodernism apocalyptically, in terms of cultural crisis and decline; instead, the contributors to this volume believe that there is a new place for Christian entrées on the academic Smorgasbord of postmodernity, and they see the postmodern turn as an opportunity for fresh perspectives on the spiritual dimensions of reading literature. These twenty scholars are an eclectic group, differing in theological and theoretical commitments, but all identifying as Christian. In this collection they enter into dialogue with a wide range of contemporary literary theorists and theoretical perspectives, and offer new readings of primary texts informed by both these theoretical constructs and their Christian faith. "The manuscript strikes out in important new directions in its sympathetic reading of postmodern theory from a Christian perspective, and, even more significantly, in its careful and measured dialogic approach to the relationship of Christian thought and contemporary literary theory." Daniel Coleman, Canada Research Chair in Critical Ethnicity and Race Studies, Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University "Too often Christian literary critics and theologians have preemptively dismissed postmodern theory, even as secular critics have been equally dismissive about the contributions that the Christian faith tradition makes to the study of literature. This volume successfully brings these two worlds together in innovative, at times challenging, and always rich ways. I do not know of a similar volume in existence, a work that gathers in one convenient publication a wide-ranging set of discussions of contemporary literary theory by Christian scholars. The editor has gathered an impressive and important set of papers here, and I believe the volume will raise much interest and provoke a good deal of constructive debate." Susan VanZanten Gallagher, Professor of English, Director, Center for Scholarship and Faculty Development, Seattle Pacific University

It would be difficult to exaggerate the worldwide impact of postmodernism on the fields of cultural production and the social sciences over the last quarter century—even if the concept has been understood in various, even contradictory, ways. An interest in postmodernism and postmodernity has been especially strong in Canada, in part thanks to the country’s non-monolithic approach to history and its multicultural understanding of nationalism, which seems to align with the decentralized, plural, and open-ended pursuit of truth as a multiple possibility as outlined by Jean-François Lyotard. In fact, long before Lyotard published his influential work The Postmodern Condition in 1979, Canadian writers and critics were employing the term to describe a new kind of writing. RE: Reading the Postmodern marks a first cautious step toward a history of Canadian postmodernism, exploring the development of the idea of the postmodern and debates about its meaning and its applicability to various genres of Canadian writing, and charting its decline in recent years as a favoured critical trope.

Highlighting the wide variety of ethical concerns considered by writers such as Timothy Findley, Thomas King, Carol Shields, Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt, and Salman Rushdie, Deborah Bowen makes the case for a new category of "postmodern realism" and shows how contemporary stories about "the real" and "the good" are constructed. Applying theoretical insights from Emmanuel Levinas and Mikhail Bakhtin, Bowen investigates categories of postmodern realism such as magic realism, parody, and metafiction while laying the groundwork for Christian readings of a medium that is often perceived as largely irreligious. An illuminating study of well-known contemporary writers, Stories of the Middle Space is a critically nuanced and methodologically innovative work that reads the postmodern from a faith-based perspectives to create new literary insights.

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: This study will depict the traumatic condition of the formerly colonised indigenous peoples of Africa and Canada. The postcolonial trauma novels, Tomson Highway s Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998) and Tsitsi Dangarembga s Nervous Conditions (1988), are first-hand accounts of colonial experience under the governance of the British Empire of the second half of the twentieth century. The semi-autobiographical novels bring up the voices of the formerly silenced natives and are pioneering accounts of the native perception of Western intrusion. The narratives portray the upsetting experiences of the era of colonisation and explore the insidious consequences of living in the midst of historical change. The novels, written in English, speak back to the canon and expose the suffering of its subjects. They depict the grim atmosphere of the colonial project and show the effects of the domination, oppression, diaspora and discrimination suffered by the natives. The novels are life narratives and as such reveal facts not recorded in history books. The trauma novels enrich and challenge the discourse on (post)colonial trauma. The native authors, Dangarembga and Highway, explore the questions of identity, trauma and resistance in the context of colonization. Their approach queries traditional notions of identity formation and the common understanding of trauma and trauma healing. With their portrayal of unique means for resistance and survival, the novelists offer a challenge to the existing beliefs and theories. In the study of the novels Nervous Conditions and Kiss of the Fur Queen, which allow silenced, repressed individuals to speak out about the unspeakable events of their lives, I will explore the formation of colonial and postcolonial identities, the nature and impact of colonial trauma and the possibility of resistance on the side of the colonised. I will work towards identifying the discrepancies between indigenous and Western notions of trauma and identity, and study the challenges of postcolonial literatures. I will explore the concept of cultural hybridity as presented in the novels and study the impact of trauma on identity construction. In the process of this study, I intend to find out to what extent trauma influences and shapes identity. Moreover, I will reconsider the Western notions of trauma and identity and examine their integrity in the colonial discourse. With the help of the novels, I will study the differences [...]

This study depicts the traumatic condition of the formerly colonised indigenous people of Africa and Canada. The postcolonial trauma novels Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998) and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) are first-hand accounts of colonial experience under the governance of the British Empire of the second half of the twentieth century. The semi-autobiographical novels bring up the voices of the formerly silenced natives and are pioneering accounts of the native perception of Western intrusion. The narratives portray the upsetting experiences of the era of colonisation and explore the insidious consequences of living in the midst of historical change. The novels, written in English, speak back to the canon and expose the suffering of its subjects. They depict the grim atmosphere of the colonial project and show the effects of the domination, oppression, diaspora and discrimination suffered by the natives. They are life narratives and as such reveal facts that are not recorded in history books. Both trauma novels enrich and challenge the discourse on (post)colonial trauma. The native authors, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Tomson Highway, explore the questions of identity, trauma and resistance in the context of colonization. Their approach queries traditional notions of identity formation and the common understanding of trauma and trauma healing. With their portrayal of unique means for resistance and survival, the novelists offer a challenge to the existing beliefs and theories.

Literary texts are more or less obliged to make reference to entities beyond themselves. Drawing on other texts, ideas previously written, or on the resources of language, they make their attempts to communicate, entertain, and enlist sympathy, or even to offer counsel. Some texts profess an a priori vision, others adopt a style of reporting only contingencies. A dialogic relation can be posited between the ideal and the real, heaven and earth, imagination and reason, langue and parole, essence and substance, poetry and prose. The poetic and creative impulse is engaged with an ever present need to purify the dialect of the tribe. The topics in Visions and Revisions reflect writers’ labours with form at whatever distance from the original sources of inspiration. The authors discussed include William Blake, Marilynne Robinson, Salman Rushdie, William Golding, John Irving, David Lodge, Sara Maitland and Hilary Mantel. Verbal by definition, texts make use of other texts and are dependent on the cultural matrix. Readers are also writers in one kind or another. In both modes they may gain impetus or inspiration by re-visioning their origins as well as their ends. This book will offer readers new ways to understand the literary creations of some writers with affinities to the Western spiritual, and specifically Christian, tradition.

The widespread opinion is that Northrop Frye’s influence reached its zenith in the 1960s and 1970s, after which point he became obsolete, his work buried in obscurity. This almost universal opinion is summed up in Terry Eagleton’s 1983 rhetorical question, "Who now reads Frye?" In The Reception of Northrop Frye, Robert D. Denham catalogues what has been written about Frye – books, articles, translations, dissertations and theses, and reviews – in order to demonstrate that the attention Frye’s work has received from the beginning has progressed at a geomantic rate. Denham also explores what we can discover once we have a fairly complete record of Frye’s reception in front of us – such as Hayden White’s theory of emplotments applied to historical writing and Byron Almén’s theory of musical narrative. The sheer quantity of what has been written about Frye reveals that the only valid response to Eagleton’s rhetorical question is "a very large and growing number," the growth being not incremental but exponential.