Our systems are now restored following recent technical disruption, and we’re working hard to catch up on publishing. We apologise for the inconvenience caused. Find out more

Recommended product

Popular links

Popular links


Narrative, Religion and Science

Narrative, Religion and Science

Narrative, Religion and Science

Fundamentalism versus Irony, 1700–1999
Stephen Prickett , Duke University, North Carolina
May 2002
Available
Paperback
9780521009836

Looking for an examination copy?

This title is not currently available for examination. However, if you are interested in the title for your course we can consider offering an examination copy. To register your interest please contact collegesales@cambridge.org providing details of the course you are teaching.

    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.

    • Exposes and explores the 'narrative' in ways of thinking about the world over 300 years
    • Unites philosophy, theology and science
    • Broad historical overview

    Reviews & endorsements

    "...an ambitious, engaging and widely ranging contribution to the interdisciplinary study of literature, philosophy, religion, and science of the last three hundred years. ...this book deserves to be read and studied carefully by a wide audience..." Religion & Literature

    "Prickett wants to carve out a space for religion against postmodern relativism... [T]his book can probably be read with most pleasure by the neophyte student of postmodernism." Choice

    "...a tour de force...it contributes provocatively and valuably to the case for regarding the narrative relation between science and religion as being much closer than some might be prone to acknowledge." The Journal of Religion

    "brisk, jargon-free and spendidly readable..." The Times Literary Supplement

    See more reviews

    Product details

    January 2005
    Adobe eBook Reader
    9780511029837
    0 pages
    0kg
    This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.

    Table of Contents

    • Introduction: Arthur Dent, Screwtape, and the mysteries of story telling
    • 1. Post-modernism, grand narratives, and Just-So stories
    • 2. Newton and Kissinger: science as irony?
    • 3. Learning to say 'I': literature and subjectivity
    • 4. Reconstructing religion: fragmentation, typology and symbolism
    • 5. The ache in the missing limb: language, truth, and presence
    • 6. Twentieth-century fundamentalisms: theology, truth, and irony
    • 7. Science and religion: language, metaphor, and consilience
    • Concluding observational postscript: the tomb of Napoleon
    • Bibliography.
      Author
    • Stephen Prickett , Duke University, North Carolina

      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.