Includes bibliographical references (p. 264-273) and index.

Machine generated contents note: 1 Postmodernism, grand narratives and just-so stories -- Postmodernism and grand narratives -- Just-so stories -- Narrative and irony -- Language, culture and reality -- 2 Newton and Kissinger: Science as irony? -- Said, Kissinger and Newton -- Revolutions and paradigms -- Models of reality -- Ambiguity and irony -- 3 Learning to say 'I': Literature and subjectivity -- Interior and exterior worlds -- The idea of literature -- The ideal of the fragment -- Two kinds of truth? -- 4 Reconstructing religion: Fragmentation, typology -- and symbolism -- From religion to religions -- Religions of nature and of the heart -- Millenarian fragments and organic wholes -- The aesthetics of irony: Keble and Rossetti -- 5 The ache in the missing limb: Language, truth and -- presence -- Coleridge: The language of the Bible -- Newman: The physiognomy of development -- Polanyi: The origins of meaning -- Steiner, Derrida and Hart: Presence and absence -- 6 Twentieth-century fundamentalisms: Theology, truth -- and irony -- Rorty: Language and reality -- Postmodernism and poetic language: Religion as aesthetics -- Logos and logothete: Reading reality -- 7 Science and religion: Language, metaphor and -- consilience -- Etching with universal acid -- Language as change -- A rebirth of images -- The fabric of the universe -- Concluding conversational postscript: The tomb -- of Napoleon.