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Fundamentalism and Literature.

Article Excerpt
Fundamentalism and Literature. Edited by Catherine Pesso-Miquel and Klaus Stierstorfer. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. vi + 220. $65 cloth.

This is a book redeemed by several excellent chapters. Redemption is made necessary because there is so little editorial input that the reader is left without a properly developed sense of initial orientation or subsequent progression. As a result, Fundamentalism and Literature has a flavor more characteristic of conference proceedings, or a journal's special issue, than of a successfully realized book. In order to establish the sense of overall coherence that makes reading something cover to cover such an enriching experience, the editors would need to have taken more care with three things: choosing their material; explaining their organizational rationale; and highlighting some of the, well, fundamental issues raised by this most topical area of study. The four-page Introduction is simply too brief to be effective. It would have helped if it had been supplemented by some sectional commentary for the book's three parts. As it is, "The Many Guises of Fundamentalism: Expanding Visions," "Beyond the Binary: Literary Interventions in Polarization," and "Fundamentalism in Post/Modernist Contexts" are such catch-all titles that--without the necessary annotation--they do little to parse the book's contents into the kind of coherently structured plan that gives readers the sense of deliberation which distinguishes a well thought out text from an assemblage of disparate pieces.

Undoubtedly one of the best of these pieces is Gordon...

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