• "This is a brilliant and original book. I am impressed with the depth and seriousness of Taylor’s work and the clarity by which he accomplishes it. Taylor has moved into the first rank of ‘theological’ readers of the literary text and the creative process."
—Sander L. Gilman, Emory University, author of Multiculturalism and the Jews
 
•"Taylor’s Para-Inquiry was groundbreaking in its own right, but this new work is far more encompassing, sensitive to cutting-edge themes and developments in Continental philosophy and cultural studies, and prepared to take these trajectories to a new level. The marriage of postmodernist theory and religious theory has not been seriously proposed, and Taylor is the first to do so in a significant as well as serious way."
—Carl Raschke, University of Denver, author of The Next Reformation
 

Religion after Postmodernism:
Retheorizing Myth and Literature
Victor E. Taylor
256 pages, 6 x 9
Cloth 978-0-8139-2761-9 • $55.00
Paper 978-0-8139-2762-6 • $19.50
Studies in Religion and Culture
November 2008


In this critical examination of the role of the imagination in the modern and postmodern periods, Victor E. Taylor looks at the 'fable' as a narrative form that addresses the ultimate questions of how to live and why. He assesses various literary theories and styles in the wake of postmodernism to reveal the ways in which fable-style narrative can be a meaningful genre for addressing traditional and post-traditional religious, ethical, and epistemological concerns. In the process, Taylor draws on key figures across the humanities--from Mircea Eliade and Claude Lévi-Strauss, Paul Ricoeur and Slavoj Zizek, to Leo Tolstoy and Franz Kafka.

Placing an emphasis on rethinking the importance of critical theory in religious studies, the author argues that a new, more demanding formulation of the concept of possibility allows for a realignment of the philosophical, mythological, and literary imaginations. By returning to the history of philosophy, myth studies, and modern literature, Taylor makes a renewed case for the significance of a distinctive formulation of religious theory as a desire for thinking. Religion after Postmodernism calls for a reconsideration of “theory as thinking” for the future of philosophy, religious studies, and literature.


Victor E. Taylor is Associate Professor at York College of Pennsylvania. His previous works include Para/Inquiry: Postmodern Religion and Culture and The Encyclopedia of Postmodernism.

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