Narrative, Religion and Science

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.

• 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.

'… a discussion which is brisk, jargon-free and splendidly readable.' The Times Literary Supplement