TY - CHAP

T1 - An Atheist’s Spirituality

T2 - Jim Crace’s Post-Religious Fiction

AU - Tate, Andrew William

PY - 2018

Y1 - 2018

N2 - Jim Crace’s fiction has a complex relationship with the broad and unstable phenomenon of ‘religion’. Although self-described as an ‘atheist’, religious language and practices haunt many of his novels and his fiction abounds with moments of unreason. Crace is a realist informed by romance, a master of suspicion who occasionally tempts sceptical readers to trust fables. Tate explores the ways in which religious acts—prayer, the language of miracle, prophecy, and pilgrimage—punctuate a body of work that scrupulously resists the numinous. This chapter argues that Crace’s critique—both of orthodox belief and, tacitly, of contemporary culture’s denial of the reality of death and suffering—places his work in a wider tradition of post-religious wrestling with finitude and ritualised mourning.

AB - Jim Crace’s fiction has a complex relationship with the broad and unstable phenomenon of ‘religion’. Although self-described as an ‘atheist’, religious language and practices haunt many of his novels and his fiction abounds with moments of unreason. Crace is a realist informed by romance, a master of suspicion who occasionally tempts sceptical readers to trust fables. Tate explores the ways in which religious acts—prayer, the language of miracle, prophecy, and pilgrimage—punctuate a body of work that scrupulously resists the numinous. This chapter argues that Crace’s critique—both of orthodox belief and, tacitly, of contemporary culture’s denial of the reality of death and suffering—places his work in a wider tradition of post-religious wrestling with finitude and ritualised mourning.

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-94093-9_12

DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-94093-9_12

M3 - Chapter (peer-reviewed)

SN - 9783319940922

SP - 181

EP - 196

BT - Jim Crace

A2 - Shaw, Katy

A2 - Aughterson, Kate

PB - Palgrave

CY - Cham

ER -