Our Research

Recent publications of interest to SNRL's areas of research.

A recent issue of Studies in Scottish Literature (45.2) is a symposium on Religion in Scottish Literary Criticism. It includes articles on: 

'Archibald Pitcairne's Liturgical Year', by Kelsey Jackson Williams; 

'Presbyterianism, 'Scottish Literature,' and John Galt's Annals of the Parish', by Robert P. Irvine; 

'Carlyle and Calvinism', by Joanna Malecka;

'The Sunset Song of Religion: Or Have We Ever Been Post-Secular', by Matthew Wickman;

'Losing his Religion: the Neglected Catholicism of A.J. Cronin', by Gerard Carruthers;

'A Revision of Power: Religion in Fionn Mac Colla's And the Cock Crew', by Brooke McLaughlin Mitchell;

'Calvinism, Catholicism, and Fascism in Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie', by Richard Rankin Russell;

'Hearing Competing Voices in James Robertson’s The Fanatic', by Alison Jack;

'Afterword: Finding Religion in Scottish Literary History', by Crawford Gribben.

Recent publications by members of the Steering Group of the Scottish Network for Religion and Literature:

Professor Alison Jack:

  • ‘Scottish Religious Poetry: From the Sixth Century to the Present’, eds. Linden Bicket, Emma Dymock, and Alison Jack (Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 2024), 320 p.
  • 'Reading Eve in Victorian literature: Revisiting the fallen woman and the angel in the house' in 'The Routledge Companion to Eve' edited by Caroline Blyth and Emily Colgan (Routledge, 2023).
  • 'The Bible and violence in crime fiction: Intertextual echoes of the Book of Revelation in three contemporary novels' in 'The Bible and Violence' edited by Chris Greenough, Mmapula Diana Kebaneilwe, Jonathan Jodamus, Johanna Stiebert (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
  • 'The Bible and Literature', in 'The New Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation' edited by Ian Boxall and Bradley C. Gregory (CUP, 2022).
  • ‘Holding “surprise wide open”: The healing of the paralyzed man lowered through the roof in the poetry of Seamus Heaney’, in Christianity and Literature (2020)
  • ‘The Calvinist Paradox in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literature’, in The History of Scottish Theology, Volume II: The Early Enlightenment to the Late Victorian Era, eds. David Fergusson and Mark Elliott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 213-227
  • The Prodigal Son in English and American Literature: Five Hundred Years of Literary Homecomings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)

Dr Linden Bicket:

  • ‘“The air of an early muse”: The visionary fictions of Ann Scott-Moncrieff’, Scottish Literary Review, Autumn/Winter (2024), pp. 1-24.
  • ‘Religion’, in ‘A Companion to Scottish Literature’, ed. by Gerard Carruthers (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2024), pp. 233-245.
  • 'Scottish Religious Poetry from the Sixth Century to the Present', ed. Linden Bicket, Emma Dymock and Alison Jack (St Andrew Press, 2024).
  • 'Catholic and Protestant Sensibilities in Scottish Literature: Stevenson to Spark', in The History of Scottish Theology, Volume III: The Long Twentieth Century, eds. David Fergusson and Mark Elliott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 271-87
  • George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017)

Dr Lois McFarland:

  • ‘Creation and Apocalypse in Feminist Speculative Fiction’, Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming (2026).
  • ‘“Lesbians at the End of the World” in Naomi Alderman’s The Future (2023) and Gabrielle Korn’s Yours for the Taking (2023)’, forthcoming Foundation article, 2026.
  • ‘“Suspicion is More Likely to Keep You Alive than Trust”: Affective Relationships with the Bible in Octavia Butler’s Parables’, Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies, 2021, 30 (1): 95–121. [DOI: 10.17613/7cpe8-bx028]

Professor David Jasper:

  • Scripture and Literature: A David Jasper Anthology. (Baylor UP, 2023)
  • Reinventing Medieval Liturgy in Victorian England (with Jeremy Smith) (Boydell and Brewer, 2023)
  • India and the End of Empire: Selected Writings of Daniel O'Connor. Edited (with Ann Loades) (Sacristy Press, 2023)
  • 'Liturgy and Literature in Late Medieval Scotland: Continuity and Discontinuity', in John Pazdziora (Ed), Christianity in Scottish Literature (Association for Scottish Literature, 2023, pp. 35-52.
  • ‘Heaven in Ordinary: Poetry and Religion in a Secular Age’ (Lutterworth, 2018)
  • ‘The Language of Liturgy: A Ritual Poetics’ (SCM, 2018)
  • ‘Literature and Theology as Grammar of Assent’ (Ashgate, 2016)

Dr Michael Fuller:

  • ‘Science and Religion in Western literature: Critical and Theological Studies’ (Routledge 2023)
  • 'Science and Religion in Western Literature: Critical and Theological Studies', ed. M. Fuller (Routledge 2023), with contributions from David Jasper on  'Marie Corelli's Electric Creed', Alison Jack on 'Weird tales: The shifting role of science and religion in literature’s search for truth', and Michael Fuller, ‘Radical Plurality: Science and religion in the writings of Karel Čapek’.
  • 'Redemption in Wagner: The case of Senta', The Wagner Journal, vol. 14 no. 1 (March 2020), pp. 4-15

 

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