The New Atheist Novel: Philosophy, Fiction and Polemic after 9/11 / Edition 1

by Arthur Bradley, Andrew Tate, Emma Mason, Mark Knight

Overview

The New Atheist Novel is the first study of a major new genre of contemporary fiction. It examines how Richard Dawkins's so-called New Atheism' movement has caught the imagination of four eminent modern novelists: Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Philip Pullman. For McEwan and his contemporaries, the contemporary novel represents a new front in the ideological war against religion, religious fundamentalism and, after 9/11, religious terror: the novel apparently stands for everything freedom, individuality, rationality and even a secular experience of the transcendental that religion seeks to overthrow. In this book, Bradley and Tate offer a genealogy of the New Atheist Novel: where it comes from, what needs it serves and, most importantly, where it may go in the future. What is it? How does it dramatise the war between belief and non-belief? To what extent does it represent a genuine ideological alternative to the religious imaginary or does it merely repeat it in secularised form? This fascinating study offers an incisive critique of this contemporary testament of literary belief and unbelief.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826446299
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	04/15/2010
Series:	New Directions in Religion and Literature
Pages:	136
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Arthur Bradley is Senior Lecturer in Literary and Cultural Studies at Lancaster University, UK.
He is the author of Negative Theology and Modern French Philosophy; Derrida's Of Grammatology: A Philosophical Guide and (with Andrew Tate) The New Atheist Novel: Fiction, Philosophy and Polemic after 9/11.

Andrew Tate is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University, UK.

Emma Mason is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK, and an editor of Bloombury's New Directions in Religion and Literature series.

Mark Knight is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, Canada. His books include Chesterton and Evil (2004), Biblical Religion and the Novel, 1700-2000 (co-edited with Thomas Woodman, 2006), Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (co-written with Emma Mason, OUP, 2006), An Introduction to Religion and Literature (2009) and Religion, Literature and the Imagination (co-edited with Louise Lee, 2009). Current projects include: a monograph entitled Good Words: Evangelicalism and the Victorian Novel; a co-authored book (with Emma Mason) entitled Faithful Reading: Poetry and Christian Practice; and a co-edited volume (with Jo Carruthers and Andrew Tate) entitled A Bible and Literature Reader. With Emma Mason, Mark Knight edits the book series New Directions in Religion and Literature for Bloomsbury Academic.

Table of Contents

Introduction1. Ian McEwan's End of the World Blues2. Martin Amis and the War for Cliché 3. Salman Rushdie and the 'Quarrel Over God'4. Philip Pullman's Republic of HeavenConclusion

Editorial Reviews

'Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate's excellent new book The New Atheist Novel" is an important contribution to this counter-movement: counter-new-atheist that is, but without being 'religious' itself.' --Sanford Lakoff

A contentious and well-informed appraisal of four major novelists, whose work deals with the central problems of our times, this clearly-written and clear-headed book is an excellent and timely analysis of the fraught intersections between contemporary fiction, religion, politics and thought. It should be read by all those with an interest in contemporary fiction.
--Sanford Lakoff

A timely and important work examining four of the most lionised novelists with an appropriately aporetic eye. --Sanford Lakoff

In comparison to the endless paeans of praise figures such as McEwan, Rushdie and Amis regularly receive, what we have here is an intelligent, critical and highly original re-reading of their work. Probably the most unsettling aspect of this startling book is the suggestion that some of the most central figures in contemporary British literature embody a profound Neo-Conservatism, one which - through its admiration of a rabid 'New Atheism' and a rage against all things Islamic - finds itself in wholesale agreement with the main tenets of the 'War on Terror' . . . I don't think I'll ever read McEwan or Amis quite as innocently again.
--Sanford Lakoff

"This reviewer...was not disappointed in the subject, the writing, the research or the outcome of this study."
-David Rosman, New York Journal of Books

From the Publisher