FLAGS AND MONUMENTS, coronations and commemorations, anthems and pledges – these are but a few of the many rituals and symbols that produce and sustain national imagination. Whether in times such as war or anti-colonial struggle when ‘hot nationalism’ stokes ardent displays of patriotism or during peaceable eras in established nations where ‘unwaved’ flags subtly press their ‘banal nationalism’, the liturgies of national civil religion remain a vital part of modern social and political existence. Investigations into those liturgies and their power are a central focus of political theology, a field that Carl A. Raschke describes thus: ‘political theology is not a theology of the political. Instead, it aims to inquire into the grounds – or perhaps we should say the ontological grounding – of the political as we know it.’ Instead of a totalising and absolute secularity, modern political life shows a persistent field of enchantment. In their introduction to the Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Theology, William T. Cavanaugh and Peter Manley Scott write, ‘What the term “political theology” names, then, is the recognition that politics never was drained of the sacred; the primary locus of the sacred merely shifted from church to nation-state and market.’ This account differs from a ‘post-secular’ awakening where politics becomes newly re-enchanted. Instead, the sacredness once held exclusively in religious faith transferred in modernity to the political realm manifested in the state and economy. Inquiry into this condition has been an inspiration for a host of philosophers, political theorists and theologians, but literary studies has been less prone to draw from its resources. This chapter offers suggestions for further development of the relationship between literature and political theology with particular attention to the value of these cross-disciplinary exchanges for modernist studies.

In fields other than modernist studies, political theology has for the past two decades provided a valuable framework for analysing literature. Especially active have been the areas of early modernity, Shakespeare studies and Romanticism, where the connections among literary works and political theology have been examined not only for their historical and hermeneutical value but also for conscious intervention in our current age.