Jonathan Swift was a High Church clergyman and Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in the established (Anglican) Church of Ireland. However, Gulliver displays no Christian devotion. His Christianity is simply assumed in a narrative which presupposes a largely Christian readership. The chapter considers Gulliver’s witness of religious practices in the countries he visits. Gulliver’s Travels is predominantly a secular book, but its philosophical, political, and historical perspectives are refracted through the lens of Swift’s religious confession. In these voyages to remote nations of the world, Gulliver encounters or discusses religio-political issues that were highly controversial back home in Gulliver’s England. The book draws upon religious history and polemic. The satire’s treatment of European religious controversy and its view of human nature attracted charges of blasphemy and irreligion, as had Swift’s earlier satiric masterpiece A Tale of a Tub.The chapter examines these charges and comments on some modern critical views of the religious implications of Gulliver’s Travels. It indicates some significant parallels between Swift’s Houyhnhnms and Thomas More’s Utopians.

“In the early eighteenth century, Britain sought to establish itself as the centre of a global knowledge network and, as part of its imperial ambitions, all of nature was subjected to scientific scrutiny and potential control. Swift’s protagonist Lemuel Gulliver recognises his potential as a broker of knowledge within numerous transnational, transcultural, and trans-species encounters, padding his empirical, observational prose with enumeration and comparison in order to convey information about supposedly faraway lands and peoples. Swift’s vignettes of interspecies or intercultural viewing ironise the colonial contact zone, revealing the partiality, contingency, and relative value of British and European scientific knowledge, and, ultimately, undermining notions of national or racial superiority upon which visions of empire rest. Gulliver’s Travels is itself a remarkable encounter, between literature and science, and the parameters of that engagement are partly defined by the colonial project, with the seemingly objective activity of observation implicated in imperial tyranny and exploitation. In scientific observation, Swift found a discursive mode around which he could structure an entire prose satire whilst also probing its intellectual and moral limits, placing the process of observation itself under satiric scrutiny.”

I have chosen “spirituality” to characterize this chapter, because in recent decades the word has become the designation for the investigation of the lived experience of Christian faith. Spirituality is rooted in the New Testament texts that speak about living in “the Spirit of Jesus.” The noun occurs in roughly the modern sense as early as around 400 CE,1 and was widely used in the Middle Ages.2 Spiritualitas was employed by Catholic authors in the Reformation era. Protestants knew the term, but shied away from it, preferring to speak of piety and active faith.

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) was published when the centrism of Cold War liberalism was supplanting the radical, multiethnic working-class collectivism characteristic of the liberal-left Popular Front and New Deal. In 1949, amid sharpening conflicts with the US’s recent ally the Soviet Union, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s spatial trope of the “vital center” redefined the US political landscape to situate, as constitutive of a new liberalism, the extremist affirmation of American national values and institutions against conflated radicalisms of right and left. While Invisible Man is often read as aligned with vital center liberalism – and as declaring African American commitment to its ethos – this chapter recovers the more idiosyncratic and radical theorization of power, institutions, and social change in the novel. Like Schlesinger, Ellison uses a spatial trope – the depths or underground – to anchor a political intervention. Motivated by the threat of nuclear apocalypse, Ellison uses that trope to critique sociopolitical institutions whose actions betray the underlying egalitarian and collective ideals they proclaim. Ellison applies this critique to Marxian and Black nationalist movements, as well as to mainstream American economic and political institutions, thus crafting a singular reformulation of political radicalism for the postwar era.

This chapter explores how the African American novel imagined a better world, experimented with form, and reflected the artistic and cultural sophistication of Black people in the twentieth century. It argues that understanding the twentieth-century African American novel in the context of various overlapping liberation movements helps us organize our thinking about the ways in which writers used long fiction to explore the social, political, ideological, and historical realities that informed the time period in which they were writing. Focusing on African American fiction produced within and around several Black liberation movements and historical interregnums – i.e., Post-Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement (BAM), and the post-BAM Toni Morrison era – the chapter examines the nuances and complexities of novelists who used the novel as form to reflect and inspire shared visions of a liberated future.

The massive cultural and social changes brought about by World War II and its aftermath enabled what came to be known as the “sexual revolution.” This chapter highlights some key novels and literary movements that responded to and helped shape the postwar discourse of sexual freedom. It attends first to battles over literary censorship in the first half of the 1960s, focusing on celebrated obscenity trials of the work of Henry Miller and William Burroughs. The chapter then turns to novelistic engagements with queer liberation, discussing the work of James Baldwin, Edmund White, Rita Mae Brown, and Leslie Feinberg, among others. Using these literary examples, it demonstrates how tensions between individualism and collectivism that are longstanding in the American political project play out in and are transformed by ideas of sexual liberation.

Two overarching and interrelated features of the Reformation period help to bring the variegated landscape of Reformation ethics and moral theology into focus. The first is a common emphasis on a fuller Christianization of the entire population, not simply of clerics and monastics, and hence on the importance of lay religious instruction and formation. Initially pursued in the hope of reform and renewal of the Church Universal, as Reformation divisions hardened the focus turned to competitive confessionalization. The second is a sense of cultural crisis; the drive for reform emerged not primarily out of a sense of optimism and capacity, but rather out of a sense of crisis, as a response to a perceived falling away from the divinely ordained social order. Reformers of various camps parted ways over whether the Christianization of society required doctrinal and institutional reforms or simply better education and formation, and over whether new religious movements represented heightened disorder or a move toward restored order.

Most theologians of the Reformation era would have found the idea of distinguishing some aspect of theology as “biblical” very surprising. It was axiomatic in the medieval church that Scripture was the authoritative source from which all Christian doctrine and ethics were derived.1 At the beginning of this period magisterial lectures in theology often took the form of extended expositions of whole books of Scripture.2 While theologians of the Reformed era did write theological works of a confessional or thematic nature, probably the largest single category of theological writing, by the number of words expended or pages printed, consisted of works of scriptural exposition and commentary. Only gradually over the course of the early modern centuries would a divide open up between practitioners of “sacred philology,” the science of the language and literature of the Bible, on one hand, and the systematic exploration of theological doctrines, on the other.

This chapter sketches the history of movement conservatism’s impact on American literature from the 1950s to the present. Midcentury conservatives, in their war against an intelligentsia that they perceived as dominated by liberal voices, evolved a model of counter-expertise that continues to inform right-wing intellectual practice today. This model was influenced by midcentury disciplinary conflicts between literature and the social sciences, with conservatives affirming a literary model of truth against the rationalism of social scientific discourse. Focusing on writers who published in the book review section of National Review, this chapter shows how the idea of conservative counter-expertise attracted critics and fiction writers such as Joan Didion, Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport, and Garry Wills. However, the conservative critique of the liberal intelligentsia was in the process of turning into a critique of expertise as such; this critique pushed many of these writers away from the magazine and helped fashion the version of the left/eight divide that defines American politics today.

This chapter reads Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad as a Janus-faced text in American literary history that looks back toward the persistent political conundrums illuminated by twentieth-century American fiction and reconfigures them in generative ways for the twenty-first century. Like earlier twentieth-century neo-slave narratives by Ishmael Reed, Octavia E. Butler, and Toni Morrison, Whitehead’s novel critiques a naïve historical story of inevitable Black progress, and it even flirts with the notion that American democracy and African American oppression are inextricable. But Whitehead rejects fatalistic narratives of inevitable injustice by showing how American normative myths can still be politically efficacious. Establishing himself as a key literary figure in contemporary Black political thought, Whitehead uses the speculative fiction genre to transform celebrated concepts in American political theory – e.g., individual freedom, legal equality, constitutional rights, representative democracy, popular sovereignty – by contextualizing them within Black experiences across time. Ultimately, his political vision amounts to a wary optimism, which Whitehead himself has called a politics of “impossible hope.”

The Bible permeated the medieval world. Peasants knew its stories from altar depictions; the Biblia pauperum (Bible of the poor); occasional sermons; and simple books that were viewed and sometimes read in the village. Intellectuals placed study of Scripture at the pinnacle of the curriculum of the “queen of the sciences,” theology. Priests could use postils, collections of sermons on the texts appointed for reading on Sundays and festival days, to prepare their own sermons, although they also often preached from the Legenda aurea, a collection of stories rehearsing the miraculous wonders performed by the saints.

Twentieth-century feminist activism and thought spread with an urgency and ambition unseen before, as advocates for women achieved mass recognition, unsettled long-held convictions, and upset the status quo in ways unimaginable in previous centuries. No novel genre escaped these changes or failed to register them. Feminist politics reshaped the content, and sometimes the form, of the novel. Yet, dramatic as the expansion of US women’s opportunities was, progress was never unchallenged or universal. Feminist political gains inspired significant backlash: Patriarchy supporters fought back. Meanwhile, feminist organizing fractured from within. Before the twentieth century even began, women of color were explaining why they couldn’t be expected to identify only as women, as if all women belonged in a single category. Their message often went unheeded, particularly in the most widely circulated versions of feminist thought, which elevated white middle-class experiences over those of working-class, Indigenous, Black, Latina, and Asian women. Throughout the century, narratives by women of color pushed back against the white supremacist version of feminism. The American novel narrated multiple feminisms, triumphant and defeated, jubilant and anguished, razor-focused and utterly lost.

Theological themes that received attention from Renaissance painters centered on the role of images in a devotional setting. Some other contentious issues between Catholics and Protestants appear, such as faith versus works, transubstantiation, the sacraments, the role of the saints, and Mary. Before the challenge raised by the Reformers, the Catholic Church could assume a broad base of common belief and common knowledge, so the art was free of polemics. The exception is the brief period of the hegemony of Savonarola in Florence in the 1490s. Fra Girolamo Savonarola, a fiery Dominican, stepped into the vacuum created when the Medici were expelled and became the leader of the populist, theocratic republic he fashioned with Christ as its head. In response to his attacks on the worldliness of the papacy, he was excommunicated by Pope Alexander VI.

Christianity is part of the history of religion and as such participates in its ambivalent and contingent relationship with light and shadow.1 Missiology and religious theology serve as particular examples of this historicity, as they are generally understood differently today than during the Age of Discovery and the Reformation.

This chapter examines the role that the crime novel played in exposing and, conversely, smoothing out the ill effects of capitalism, and of drawing attention to the intersections between crime, business, and the law. It argues that crime fiction’s ability to expose violent wrongdoing speaks to a wafer-thin ethical code in twentieth-century American society whereby the appearance of sanction and punishment trumps substantive claims to rightness and justice. The chapter also explores gendered and racial noir fiction, particularly in the works of the African American novelist Chester Himes. Ultimately, the chapter reveals the ambivalent politics of much American crime fiction: between, on the one hand, the desire for community and for a workable notion of the public and, on the other, the incorporation of this notion of the public by private enterprise and the allure of greed, profit, and gain.