Review of Rewriting God: Spirituality in Contemporary Australian Women 's Fiction, by Elaine Lindsay, and Feminist Poetics of the Sacred: Creative Suspicions, edited by Frances Devlin-Gass and Lynn McCredden

Abstract

It is not only global weather patterns that are changing, it seems. It is hard to imagine being asked to review two books dealing with theological issues even two or three years ago. The 'sceptical and utilitarian spirit' A.G. Stephens once characterised as typically Australian which 'values the present hour and refuses to guarantee the present for any visionary future lacking a rational guarantee' seems to be giving way to a wider range of questions about the relations between literature and life, the nature of these terms, what fiction might have to say, whether or not the experience it contains is produced by the author and reader and thus self-referential, or points to and impacts upon social and even perhaps political 'reality', and so on.