This research approaches new intersections between literature and religion from different points of view. The awareness that religion, taken in its widest meaning, has regained a central role in contemporary society and in academic courses inspired the choice of the subject. The renewed interest that literary studies have taken in religion lately, and the attention that theologians have been paying to literature emphasize the need for a deeper analysis of the relationship between the two disciplines. The Western Judaic-Christian tradition and Anglo-American literature have been the privileged field of analysis of this kind of research for the past decades. Yet the modern world has built its cultural identity also on the awareness of religious pluralism. Following the expansion of Western Empires, the universal, the universalization of Christianity has fostered the need for an increasingly pluralistic approach to world religions.
Literature offers a privileged field where these issues can be discussed and developed, thanks to the syncretic and ethical vocation that characterizes literary discourse. Being rooted in imagination and in the unquenchable yearning for the definition of horizons of meaning, as regards form literature and religion share a symbolic and narrative tendency, and both engage with the existential horizons of expectation, fear and hope that are based on an idea of faith as practice of belief, or as ¿voluntary suspension of disbelief¿ (Coleridge) when man confronts what does not fall within the sphere of the immediate and ordinary experience. There stems from this the paradoxical idea according to which literature never completely got rid of the original theological and mythical core, despite the secularization which has been taking place ever since and has left its mark on literary works.
