Jeanette Winterson and Religion

Since the publication of her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson quickly established herself as a powerful and insightful writer on sexuality and gender. However, the profound and persistent religious themes of her work have received much less critical attention.
Jeanette Winterson and Religion is the first in-depth study of the ways in which Winterson navigates the sacred and the profane in the full range of her writing, from her first novel to later works such as The PowerBook and The Stone Gods. This book reads the author's work alongside the theological turn in the thought of such theorists as Alain Badiou, John D. Caputo and Julia Kristeva as well as feminist and queer theologians such as Catherine Keller and Marcella Althaus-Reid. In this way, Jeanette Winterson and Religion reveals how Jeanette Winterson stakes out a unique and intriguing post-secular literary form of the sacred.

“Emily McAvan incisively interrogates a theme conspicuous by its absence in most extant criticism of Winterson's writing: the fierce interplay of religion with sexuality, gender and power. Here queerness and holiness are interwoven as visionary, and Winterson herself is claimed as prophetic. In this expansive book, McAvan highlights Winterson's generative deconstruction of binaries such as secular and sacred, sameness and otherness, belief and unbelief, and identifies her as a perceptive religious thinker.” —Susannah Cornwall, Senior Lecturer in Constructive Theologies, University of Exeter

“At long last a powerful study of a queer and feminist writer that brings the body and the spirit together. In this finely written book Em McAvan turns to the postmodern sacred to provide a rigorous theoretical framework for a reading of Jeanette Winterson's novels of lesbian and bisexual love.” —Vijay Mishra, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Murdoch University, Australia