Publisher's Synopsis
Although fundamentalism is often closely associated with textuality, and with sacred texts in particular, the complex relations uniting literature and fundamentalism have only just recently started to attract the interest of critics and scholars.
The essays in this volume, the fruit of scholars from a wide range of nationalities and based on a variety of critical and theoretical frameworks, examine how different sorts of fundamentalism can interact with different forms of “literature”—from high-brow classical texts to very recent forms of popular culture.
Christian fundamentalism, as well as Islamist or Hindu versions of fundamentalism, come under scrutiny, while the texts and art forms examined range from Daniel Defoe's opinions on Dissenters to contemporary works by the likes of Ian McEwan, Hanif Kureishi, and Orhan Pamuk, and from intellectual pamphlets and serious, committed novels to Jack Chick's Fundamentalist Christian comics or Sir Terry Pratchett's fantasy comic series about the Discworld.
The volume shows that while books can still be threatened by contemporary forms of auto-da-fé—Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses being one obvious example—they can also, conversely, provide a dangerously witty and attractive medium for the propagation and proliferation of fundamentalist ideas. This collection, which includes an essay by Scottish novelist Suhayl Saadi, should be of interest to all the scholars who feel that we need an in-depth study of the links between literature and fundamentalism in order better to grasp the phenomenon, and its strong impact on societies and cultures.
