Wallace “dabbled in religion,” as Matthew Gilbert put it in a 1997 interview with the author, but while he was openly intrigued by it, Wallace eschewed organized religion. Much of his work is characterized by a search for meaning that in other circumstances or periods would have constituted religious questing, and the absence of belief is generally portrayed in his work as part of the malaise of contemporary life. Religious language permeates the corpus, and religious iconography plays a significant role in several texts. Belief as a good in itself appears to be promoted in his work on politics, on aesthetics, and on culture, with the idea of faith central to his project of working against solipsism, but religion as a practice is often viewed with suspicion. This essay traces that pattern in Wallace’s writing, beginning with Broom’s connection of evangelical religion with capitalism by way of the G.O.D and the figure of John, the wasted prophet son of immense wealth, positioning a particularly American form of religious practice as pernicious and profit-driven. Don’s particular ambivalence about religion in Infinite Jest highlights a complex relationship between faith as a personal attribute and religion as a collective one. The essay argues that Wallace’s approach to religious thought bears the same ambivalent inflections as his work on art and entertainment, which can both inspire thought and suppress it. Nevertheless, the essay argues that while Wallace appeared to view organized religion with some wariness, the metanarratives of religion – belief, faith, transcendence and a sense of the sacred – constitute vital and consistent themes of his craft.

After free secondary-school education became available for all in Ireland, questions as to the outline and content of a literary curriculum at secondary level became relevant to our understanding of how a contemporary generation of Irish writers responded to, and re-engaged with, their own educational background. This chapter initially offers a brief overview of Irish government policy in education before 1940, before discussing the key curricular developments between 1940 and 1980, bringing to light the political and cultural negotiations that determined how English literature was taught in Irish second-level schools. When free second-level education was introduced in Northern Ireland (1947) and in the Republic of Ireland (1967), it amounted to a widening of social access to education that was of huge personal significance to many Irish writers. The second half of this chapter explores the shaping power of the English literature programme for the Irish literary imagination through a study of how a selection of Irish writers who were students of English during these decades depicted their educational formation; this section focusses on writers such as John McGahern, Seamus Deane, and Paula Meehan, amongst others.