Religion and Literature

In Religion and Literature: History and Method Eric Ziolkowski sets out to trace the origin of the study of religion and literature and consider the problems it currently faces. Paying particular attention to the history and definitions of the key terms “literature,” “religion,” and “theology,” Ziolkowski sketches a helpful genealogy (or genealogies) of the scholarship on religion and literature. In doing so, Ziolkowski identifies the central problem of the study of religion and literature: “[it] is not a discipline in any strict sense” (1). Instead, scholars from a variety of disciplines with different historical, methodological, and cultural emphases describe their work as “religion and literature,” despite profound disciplinary and methodological differences. Because of the field’s lack of single direction, Ziolkowski’s is an instructive guide for those studying religion and literature.

Ziolkowski’s central claim is that the study of religion and literature cannot be and has never been a single or unified project because the terms “religion” and “literature” themselves have always contained multiple, complicated meanings. By recognizing this simple fact, Ziolkowski is able to show that one can locate the origin of religion and literature as a field at various historical points: in antiquity; in 19^th-century Romanticism; in a critical heritage  from Matthew Arnold to T. S. Eliot and Paul Tillich; or in the institutional emergence of programs like the Religion, Literature, and Visual Culture program at the University of Chicago’s Divinity School, founded by Nathan A. Scott. Through outlining these varied origin stories, Ziolkowski describes how methodologies like phenomenology, New Criticism, New Historicism, structuralism, and deconstructionism have come to engage and theorize the relationship between religion and literature.  

While the book includes a diversity of voices despite its short length (96 pages of content), one figure who looms large in Ziolkowki’s genealogy is Nathan A. Scott. Scott, the founder of the first institutional program for theology (later religion) and literature, appears throughout the book, but especially in chapters 4 and 5 where Ziolkowski describes how it was Scott who first conceived of a truly interdisciplinary study of theology and literature (31). According to Ziolkowski, Scott’s work on theology and literature “epitomizes interdisciplinarity” in that it transfers the methods of literary studies to bear on theology and vice versa (29). However, as becomes clear throughout the book, “theology and literature,” as Scott developed it, is notably different from the “religion and literature” of today: “Today, religion and literature as an academic pursuit is quite simply not what Scott and other pioneering figures in the ‘field’ of theology and literature conceived it to be” (31, emphasis original). Ziolkowski describes religion and literature today as “bifurcated,” with those from religious studies tending to see literature as representative of religious life, and those in other disciplines like literature and theology focusing on religious belief or theological content in literature (31).

In addition to demonstrating one of the central claims of the book, Ziolkowski’s treatment of Scott in the early chapters is representative of his historical, genealogical approach as he describes Scott’s key interlocutors (such as Paul Tillich), his primary adversaries (the deconstructionists), and describes Scott’s general understanding of the relationship between religion and literature. However, Ziolkowski’s main emphasis is on the historical development of the field, rather than on the particular arguments and frameworks of Scott and the other scholars he engaged. The result is a helpful guide for readers detailing how the different approaches that make up the study of religion and literature today developed. Ziolkowski makes sense of the distinct journals, institutions, and professional organizations that frequently confuse the student of religion and literature, and in doing so constructs one of the only histories of the “field” to date.

By taking this approach, though, the work often prioritizes history over method. The book refers to a voluminous array of scholars working on religion and literature and does well to arrange them into historical genealogies; however, we are rarely given insights into their methods qua methods, as opposed to methods as part of a historical tapestry. One exception to this is in the final chapter¾“Looking Futureward”—where Ziolkowski addresses the relatively new methodologies of comparativism and cognitive science and describes the particular perspectives, assumptions, and commitments they bring to religion and literature. The same thorough methodological review might have been more directly applied throughout, especially because of the estrangement of religious studies and other disciplines that Ziolkowski notes as distinguishing religion and literature today from the field Scott envisioned.

In a world where disciplinary boundaries can lead to overlooking related work in other departments, such methodological work is urgently needed, and seems like what Ziolkowski promises by including “Method” in his title. However, despite regularly citing of literary scholars like Northrop Frye, Elisabeth Jay, and Mark Knight, Ziolkowski never indicates what these scholars, with their specific literary critical methodology, bring to the conversation with scholars from other disciplines. Thus the book, while recognizing the unhelpful bifurcation between the disciplines that engage religion and literature, ultimately privileges religious studies over other disciplines. Had more attention been spent on the insights brought to the conversation by various disciplines and their diverse methodologies, the book may have gone far in mending this divide.

This point, however, should not prevent a reader from picking up this immensely useful book. For in setting out a history of religion and literature that promises to introduce a new generation of scholars to the complicated past of religion and literature, Ziolkowski has done an immeasurable service. Without hesitation, I would recommend this book to any colleague, student, or member of the public interested in religion and literature, and indeed I have already done so.

Joshua Rawleigh is a PhD candidate in English literature at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Joshua Thomas Rawleigh

Date Of Review:

January 2, 2023