This book challenges the status quo of studies in literature and religion by returning to “experience” as a bridge between theory and practice. Essays focus on keywords of religious experience and demonstrate their applications in drama, fiction, and poetry.

Each chapter explores the broad significance of its keyword as a category of psychological and social behavior and tracks its unique articulation by individual authors, including Conrad, Beecher Stowe and Melville. Together, the chapters construct a critical foundation for studying literature not only from the perspectives of theology and historicism but from the ways that literary experience reflects, reinforces, and sometimes challenges religious experience.

An exciting new collection that approaches complex questions, texts and authors from a fresh set of perspectives. These authors regard religion or spirituality not simply as a matter of intellectual assent but an embodied set of practices and phenomena. The so called ‘religious turn’ is reappraised and re-read in ways that powerfully remind us of its complexity and persistence.

Matthew J. Smith is Associate Professor of English at Azusa Pacific University. He is the author of Performance and Religion in Early Modern England: Stage, Cathedral, Wagon, Street (Notre Dame, 2018) and co-editor, with Julia Lupton, of Face to Face in Shakespearean Drama (Edinburgh, 2019). He is guest editor of two special issues of Christianity & Literature: The
Sacramental Text Reconsidered (2016) and Sincerity (co-editor, 2017).

Caleb D. Spencer is Associate Professor of English at Azusa Pacific University. His essays appear in Religion & Literature, Journal of the Religion and Popular Culture, and Christianity & Literature. He co-edited Sincerity, a special issue of Christianity & Literature (2017). He also serves as Associate Editor of the journal, Christianity & Literature.