The New Atheist Novel: Fiction, Philosophy and Polemic After 9/11 (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780826444295)

The New Atheist Novel is the first study of a major new genre of contemporary fiction. It examines how Richard Dawkins's so-called 'New Atheism' movement has caught the imagination of four eminent modern novelists: Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Philip Pullman. For McEwan and his contemporaries, the contemporary novel represents a new front in the ideological war against religion, religious fundamentalism and, after 9/11, religious terror: the novel apparently stands for everything freedom, individuality, rationality and even a secular experience of the transcendental that religion seeks to overthrow. In this book, Bradley and Tate offer a genealogy of the New Atheist Novel: where it comes from, what needs it serves and, most importantly, where it may go in the future. What is it? How does it dramatise the war between belief and non-belief? To what extent does it represent a genuine ideological alternative to the religious imaginary or does it merely repeat it in secularised form? This fascinating study offers an incisive critique of this contemporary testament of literary belief and unbelief.

Author: Arthur Bradley, Andrew Tate
ISBN-10: 0826444296
ISBN-13: 9780826444295
Publisher: Continnuum-3PL
Language: English
Published: 04/15/2010
Pages: 160
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.74lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.50d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 11/01/2010