Dr. Luke Ferretter

Interests

20^th/21st-Century American Literature
Post-1945 American Fiction
20^th/21st-Century British Literature
Religion and Literature
The Bible as Literature
Postsecularism 
Literary Theory

Education

Ph.D. University of St. Andrews
M.A. University of Oxford
B.A. University of Oxford

Bio

I am a Christian literary critic, currently working on two book projects – one on the religious thought and feeling of post-1945 American novelists, and another on the presence of Catholic sensibilities in post-1945 American fiction. I have been working in literary criticism and Christian theology since my PhD dissertation at the University of St. Andrews, which became my first book, Towards a Christian Literary Theory (Palgrave, 2003). I have written books on D. H. Lawrence and on Sylvia Plath – The Glyph and the Gramophone: D. H. Lawrence's Religion (Bloomsbury, 2013) and Sylvia Plath's Fiction: A Critical Study (Edinburgh UP, 2010) – and continue to have research interests in both authors. My most recent monograph is a textbook on the Bible as literature – The Bible as Literature: A New Introduction (Routledge, 2025), a one-stop-shop for literature students and scholars on literary study of the Bible. Future plans include an edition of Zelda Fitzgerald’s novel Save Me the Waltz. I welcome applications for graduate study in any aspect of 20^th/21^st century American and British literature, especially studies of its religious or theological significance. 

When I am not writing or teaching, I like to spend time with my wife Jen and our five children. I enjoy hiking, movies, travel, music, and sports. I am always happy when the Dallas Cowboys win.

Selected Books

• The Bible as Literature: A New Introduction (Routledge, 2025).

• The Glyph and the Gramophone: D. H. Lawrence's Religion (Bloomsbury, 2013).

• Sylvia Plath's Fiction: A Critical Study (Edinburgh UP, 2010).

• Towards a Christian Literary Theory (Palgrave, 2003).

Selected Articles 

• “Literature in the Self-Disclosure of God: An Interview with Paul Fiddes”, Perspectives in Religious Studies 51:1 (2024), 81-91 (Special issue on “Baptists and the Literary Imagination”, ed. Elizabeth H. Flowers and Darren J. Middleton). 

• “D. H. Lawrence’s Dark God”, The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism, Myth and Religion, ed. Suzanne Hobson and Andrew Radford (Edinburgh UP, 2023), 67-80.

• “Seriously Modified Beliefs: The Reverend Robert Reid’s Influence on D. H. Lawrence”, Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies 6:1 (2021), 17-40.

• “Shir Ha-Elohim: A Prolegomenon to Biblical Aesthetics”, Christianity and Literature 69:3 (2020), 339-357.

• “Religion”, D. H. Lawrence in Context, ed. Andrew Harrison (Cambridge UP, 2018), 183-191.

• “Religious Pluralism and the Beats”, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion, ed. Mark Knight (Routledge, 2016), 410-421. 

• “‘A Prison for the Infinite’: D. H. Lawrence and Bertrand Russell on the War”, Études lawrenciennes 46 (2015), 1-14.

• “Procrustean Identity: Sylvia Plath’s Women’s Magazine Fiction”, Representing Sylvia Plath: New Essays on the Writer and Representation, ed. Tracy Brain and Sally Bayley (Cambridge UP, 2011), 147-164. 

Classes Taught

• Modern American Novel, 1900-1945

• Post-1945 American Novel

• Contemporary Literary Theory: A Christian Approach

• The Bible as Literature 

• American Literature from Whitman

• Sylvia Plath

• Samuel Beckett

• British Literature