Narrative, Religion, and Science: Fundamentalism Versus Irony, 1700-1999

An increasing number of contemporary scientists, philosophers and theologians downplay their professional authority and describe their work as simply "telling stories about the world". If this is so, literary criticism can and should be applied to all these fields. Yet story telling is neither innocent nor empty-handed. Register, rhetoric, and imagery all manipulate in their own ways. Above all, irony emerges as the natural mode of our modern fragmented culture. Since the eighteenth century there have been only two possible ways of understanding the world--the fundamentalist and the ironic.

Author: Stephen Prickett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 03/28/2002
Pages: 290
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.03lbs
Size: 9.06h x 6.16w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780521009836

Review Citation(s):
Choice 11/01/2002 pg. 464

About the Author
Prickett, Stephen: - Stephen Prickett is Professor of English at Duke University, North Carolina. Prior to this he was Regius Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Glasgow. He took his BA at Cambridge (Trinity Hall) and subsequently did postgraduate work in Oxford (University College) and back in Cambridge, where he took his PhD in 1968. Previous appointments include the Chair of English at the Australian National University in Canberra (1983-9), and teaching posts at the Universities of Sussex (1967-82), Minnesota (1979-80), and Smith College, Massachusetts(1970-1). Aarhus University, Denmark (1997) and Singapore (1999). He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, former Chairman of the UK Higher Education Foundation, President of the European Society for the Study of Literature and Theology, and of the George MacDonald Society. He has published one novel, thirteen monographs, some seventy five articles on Romanticism, Victorian Studies and related topics, especially on literature and theology, including Coleridge and Wordsworth: The Poetry of Growth (1970), Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (1976), Victorian Fantasy (1978), The Romantics (ed.) (1981), Words and the Word: Language, Poetics and Biblical Interpretation (1986), Reading the Text: Biblical Criticism and Literary Theory (ed. 1991), and Origins of Narrative: the Romantic Appropriation of the Bible (1996). He is also joint author (with Robert Barnes) of the volume on the Bible for the Cambridge University Press Landmarks of World Literature Series (1991), and joint editor (with Robert Carroll) of the Oxford University Press World's Classics Bible (1997) and (with David Jasper) of the new Blackwells Reader in Literature and Religion (1999). He is General Editor of the Macmillan Romanticism in Perspective Series, and editorial consultant to the Oxford Bible Commentary Series and to Blackwells Bible Commentaries.

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