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This highly readable book represents a unique approach to the controverted matter of the relations of literature and religion, eschewing linear argument in favor of a nuanced essayistic manner that elucidates texts and issues of immediate and lasting concern.

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Introduction: ´The hint half guessed, the gift half understood´ Essaying the Via Media : John Dryden´s Religio Laici and Alexander Pope´s An Essay on Man ´ A grander scheme of salvation than the christian religion´: John Keats, a New Religion of Love, and the Hoodwinking of ´The Eve of St. Agnes´ George Eliot´s Layman´s Faith: The Lyrical Essay-Novel Adam Bede Priests of Eternal Imagination: Literature and Religion The Instance of James Joyce and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Journey towards Understanding: T.S. Eliot and the Progress of the ´Intelligent Believer´´Religious Feeling without Religious Images´: E.B. White´s Essays Religio Criticae: An Essay on Reception and Response

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"Atkins is a complete master of the literary works he discusses and the secondary criticism surrounding them. His citations from those works are succinct and just right; he is a brilliant reader and interpreter. His recovery of a religious Ezra Pound, for one, is ground breaking and controversial." - Will Willimon, Bishop, the United Methodist Church, Birmingham, Alabama and author of The Early Sermons of Karl Barth

"Literary Paths to Religious Understanding is a work that deals with important issues - important humanly and professionally. Its audience should be a wide one. Like Geoffrey Hartman towards the end of his career (with whom he has long acknowledged an affinity), Atkins seems to be stepping away from a narrowly scholarly path to explore issues that have stimulated him for some time, and that will also stimulate his readers." - Jan Gorak, Professor of English, University of Denver

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G. DOUGLAS ATKINS is professor of English at the University of Kansas, USA and author or co-editor of thirteen books, including the forthcoming On the Familiar Essay (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

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