ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors seek to offer a brief survey of what they might call some of the varieties of religious experience in the contemporary novel from re-writings of gospel narratives to representations of Islam and Islamism. They present a certain argument about the future of religion in the contemporary novel. The authors argue that one possible future for religion in twenty-first century fiction may lie in a certain kind of religious realism or materialism that intriguingly complicates the various kind of categories and oppositions in which the relationship between literature and religion are normally read and understood. They show that contemporary fiction reveals all the other deep fiduciary investments in Big Others that circulate unnoticed within the contemporary novel: family, work and, most destructively, capital. The authors explore the possibility that religion may perversely be a form of political resistance to the various false transcendences that persist in the contemporary novel.
