Post-Secular Imaginations in Contemporary Australia Literature

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Contemporary Australasian literature contains equivocal and conflicted religious engagements which are out of sync with the wider national rhetoric and which, as a result of broader cultural dominances, have received little scholarly attention. The proposed research will examine engagements with religion in contemporary Australasian literature using a post-secular framework. The designation of Australasia (as distinct from Oceania) refers to Australia and New Zealand, and texts from both countries will generate a cross-section of literature, illuminating literary engagements with religion that span from the faithful, to the equivocal, to the sceptical and dissentient. The proposed research will ask the question: is there, within contemporary Australasian literature, the emergence of a post-secular outlook that has gone unnoticed or been under-appreciated? How is this outlook rendered? And what does its identification and study mean for Australasian religion and literatures studies, and Oceanic post-colonial literary studies more broadly? In line with Graham Ward's observation that 'culturally we are still awash with "discursive religiosity"', this research will contend that polytonal religious engagements continue to saturate contemporary Australasian literature, but in ways that are difficult to delineate in terms of the traditional distinction between the religious and the secular.Across Australasia, scholarly omissions exist where the place of religion, and the interdependency of the secular and the religious, is overlooked, undermined and devalued. Clamorous dissent over the 'disease' of Puritanism in the late-nineteenth to early twentieth-centuries modulated into a muted dis-ease toward religion more broadly going into the mid-to-late twentieth century. With some exceptions, there remains more generally what John Stenhouse has called a 'loud silence' on religion in Australasian academic studies. This appears to form part of a wider patter of Antipodean 'scepticism toward religion, combined with an anticlerical[ism]' that is especially prominent in literary criticism. Recent scholarship has seen the notion of post-secularity markedly evolve, particularly in the social sciences, with the work of Talal Asad, José Casanova, John Milbank and Philip Blond dominant in these developments. I take the 'post-secular' framework with an awareness of the contestation surrounding the term's explanatory efficacy (as has been discussed by both Graham Ward and Colin Jager ) whilst simultaneously recognising that a post-secular 'turn' in religion and literature studies has promoted vital scholarship on religious and secular inter-dynamics. While more traditional 'theology and literature' studies inform this research, it will not be a theological reading. Rather a post-secular framing will allow space to explore the literature's conflicted and heterogeneous engagements with religion, as well as post-colonial intricacies which bely harsh distinctions and rigid binaries. The major axis underpinning my understanding of post-secular comes from Gavin Hopps, who suggests that a literary 'post-secular outlook' can be the renouncement of 'a secular construal of reality without adopting an exclusively religious stance', with the post-secular founded 'on scepticism as much as if not more than it is on faith.' Hopps' theory aligns with the liminal literary subject matter which the proposed research will be navigating.