Like and Unlike God: Religious Imaginations in Modern and Contemporary Fiction

The "postmodernist context" of contemporary literary studies has seemed to push religious ideas to the margins. Nevertheless, religious concerns are deeply embedded in literature. This book provides a fresh and readable account of the literary and the religious. Drawing upon the work of David Tracy, Neary presents two ways of imagining the human relationship with the divine, the analogical and the dialogical imaginations. After an introductory look at the way in which the Christian theological tradition presents them, the book examines these imaginations and their complicated relationships within the works of two seminal modernist authors of fiction (Joseph Conrad and James Joyce), of a trio of Christian literary critics, and of several contemporary novelists who exemplify both traditional and postmodernist narrative forms (Anne Tyler, Muriel Spark, Thomas Pynchon, and D.J. Thomas).