Recognized as a regional writer, Flannery O’Connor displays an unprecedented interest in the cosmopolitan world, particularly Asia, in her final story, “Parker’s Back.” Contextualized in the 1960s United States, O’Connor’s reference to the East carries significant cultural and political weight. While ramifications of Parker’s encounters with the East signify the cultural openness brought to his country by globalization, Parker’s return to the American South demonstrates her cultural anxiety about the increasingly popularity of Asian influences, especially Buddhism. Furthermore, the globalist symbolism of Parker’s tattoos also bears a political significance — anti-colonialism in Asian and African countries inspired the Black community to fight for its due rights. In this way, the fictional racialization and humiliation of the male protagonist metaphorize Black people’s suffering; and O’Connor’s equation of physical suffering with redemption thus reflect her sympathy for Black people but also a reluctance to see any immediate change of the Southern racial system.
“Luxurious Hearses” is the only story in Uwem Akpan’s collection, Say You’re One of Them, set in Akpan’s native Nigeria. This article argues that the hermeneutical lens of identity uncovers complexities and nuances of the story that can be missed in readings that reduce the novella to a simple meaning of acceptance and tolerance. My reading uncovers an irony laced in the story: in acts of violence against another religious identity, the story’s characters unwittingly perpetuate the logic of Western colonialism’s legacy which they claim to reject. As clarified further below, by “colonialism,” I mean less particular economic systems and more specifically colonialism as a form of imagination and pattern of thinking. Akpan’s story hints at the possibility of an inclusive religious imagination that simultaneously upholds the potential for fidelity to a monotheistic faith such as Islam or Christianity.
This essay explores how reading Flannery O’Connor’s fiction and traveling abroad share the important capacity to disorient human beings and why such a disorientation offers an opportunity for human flourishing. Human beings are creatures of comfort and readily gravitate toward activities and experiences that soothe and console us rather than ones which disrupt and injure us. However, just as human muscles grow and strengthen by being pushed to their limits, so too does the human person grow in virtue by navigating obstacles, sufferings, and trails that allow the heart, mind, and soul to expand.
Jane Austen's last novel, Persuasion (1818), features a heroine in Anne Elliot whose humility, morality, and sense of duty nearly ruin her chances for happiness with Captain Wentworth. Though Anne endures loneliness through years of separation from Wentworth, she upholds ethical principles representing an Enlightenment model of moral action that Austen privileges in all her novels. Persuasion rejects utilitarian 'means-to-an-end' principles that conflict with the moral imperatives of the Enlightenment philosopher, Immanuel Kant (1724- 1804), whose works influenced Austen's creation of her mature, morally conscious heroes and heroines; their sense of moral duty conforms to Kant's definition of the categorical imperative, which he calls the "supreme principle of morality" in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785).
In Richard Kim’s The Martyred, Mr. Shin makes a false confession to protect suffering people from further despair. Although popular interpretations lionize Shin for his seemingly self-sacrificial act, this essay highlights the psychological complexity of Shin’s motives, and his blind spots. Also, by indicating the superficiality of evidence in favor of Shin’s lie, including the lack of narrative voice on the part of those for whom the illusion is meant, I critique the popular view that the novel promotes the idea of illusion as necessary. Finally, I argue that despite his flawed initial action, Shin is nonetheless on a redemptive trajectory, as demonstrated by his eventual choice to stay and suffer with the Christians of Pyŏngyang, and by the character of his interaction with Captain Lee, the narrator. It is these actions, rather than Shin’s manufacturing of an illusion, that carry the novel’s message of hope.
This essay contextualizes T. S. Eliot’s poem Ash-Wednesday (1930) within Eliot’s increased focus on distraction and attention across his literary criticism and political commentaries of the 1920s and 30s, and within the growing anxiety over distraction as a modern phenomenon in the years leading up to World War II. As the poem’s speaker repeatedly pauses, falters, and recalibrates the spiritual journey, Eliot thinks through the terms under which distraction might prove inevitable to a rigorous spiritual practice, and where strict attention might be more warranted. Through this speaker who constantly must shift attention toward and away from certain prayers, petitions, and rituals in order to inch closer to the divine, Eliot not only anticipates the vision of the “distraction fit” of “The Dry Salvages,” but also unites the more dogmatic prose of his post-conversion writings with the more pluralistic visions of his poetry.
Is it possible to write a good poem about the evils of birth control? That, in a sense, is the question at the heart of Poemas dogmáticos (Dogmatic Poems, 1971), a slender volume by Chilean poet and priest José Miguel Ibáñez (b. 1936). Ibáñez’s verse reflects an unapologetically traditionalist Roman Catholicism, attacking abortion, contraception, moral relativism, liberation theology, and the Cuban Revolution. Yet his poems are not simply clumsy versifications of doctrine. Instead, they embody what I call “a poetics of dogma”: a vision in which theological commitments shape not only his own practice as a poet but also the very conditions of poetic meaning. Taking as case study a dense poem on birth control, I show how Ibáñez forges a symbolic link between poetic creation and biological procreation, suggesting that contraception is, symbolically, a refusal of the creative impulse upon which poetry itself depends.
This article explores how the scholar, poet, novelist, and mystic A. E. Waite, shaped by the influence of George MacDonald, fostered a literary movement that sought to rectify earlier definitions of mysticism and distinguish mysticism from the occult arts by rooting his understanding of mysticism in a sacramental theology aligned with Christian religious tradition. The author argues that Waite’s work had profound consequences for the spiritual lives of many Edwardian readers, for subsequent decades of spiritual writers, and even for the course of spirituality and religion in our own day and time.
Anglican preacher Robert South’s 1679 sermon on ingratitude provides an unexamined rationale that justifies what Elizabeth Bennet calls her “breach of promise” in thanking Darcy for engineering Lydia’s marriage to Wickham in Pride and Prejudice. This essay argues that Austen alludes to South’s identification of gratitude as a virtue to critique and amend Dr. Gregory’s belief that a woman’s gratitude for an amiable suitor provides a sufficient basis for a happy marriage. When Elizabeth expresses her gratitude to Darcy, she demonstrates agency rather than passive acceptance, in a move that acknowledges the way he has reformed himself for her.
Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils (1986) has received little published critical analysis despite its status as a Booker Prize winner for that year. Part of this may be due to Amis’s irascible reputation, deserved or not, as a bibulous bête noire of English letters—but nevertheless, it is curious that one of Amis’s final masterpieces has been so overlooked. This work attempts to remedy this absence and calls to attention the extraordinary amount of sarcastic and vitriolic dialogue in the novel, seeing an intelligent syntax: its speech acts serve the interests of predatory power relationships in strategically undercutting others, hoarding information, and confusing others via ambiguity or deniability. The characters’ verbal hostilities help structure and index The Old Devils’ final tonal change into greater generosity and forgiveness. Despite the warmer ending, sarcasm is the overlooked key to understanding Amis’s late triumph.
Going well beyond most contemporary crime thrillers, bestselling author Dennis Lehane’s first five Kenzie and Gennaro novels published in the 1990s constitute probing noir parables of the sins-of-the-fathers motif including child abuse. The biblical concept of generational iniquity and its consequences is tied closely to what one character in Darkness, Take My Hand (1996) terms a “postmodern malaise” linked to a contemporaneous devaluation of human life. Although Lehane’s narrator in the series, private investigator Patrick Kenzie, is no moralist, he recognizes through the trauma of his own abuse at the hands of a tyrannical father contributing reasons for this pervasive corruption of values. By forthrightly addressing issues of moral ambiguity as they involve vexed questions of what is legal versus what is right, this popular novelist’s forensic texts transcend the usual limitations of his chosen genre.
Although one of the foremost academics of his era — he was provost at both Eton and Cambridge — M. R. James is today known more for his elegant ghost stories than for his voluminous writings on history, religion, and archaeology. One of his best-known works in the horror genre is "A Warning to the Curious," first published in 1925. In this tale of an amateur archaeologist — more looter than scholar — who violates a tomb and thereby triggers the wrath of a guardian spirit, James, a lay clergyman in addition to his other titles, alludes often to the tragedy of Judas — the ultimate traitor in western culture — to emphasize the treasonous actions of the young archaeologist who, by stealing one of the guardian crowns buried on the coast of England to protect the kingdom from invasion, betrays not just his profession, but indeed, his own country: and thus, in the end, he pays the Judas price for his betrayal.
Both Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair (1951) and Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means (1963) feature bomb explosions during the London blitz which instigate instances of Catholic conversion that are traumatic. Faith unfolds belatedly in a phenomenon Freud calls nachtraglichkeit, or afterwardsness. Although the study of religion and literature has gained more legitimacy over the past decade, very little scholarship brings trauma theory into the field. This paper opens dialogue between literature, theology, and trauma by appropriating Richard Kearney’s religious hermeneutics to argue that Greene’s and Spark’s novels transform Joyce’s secular notion of epiphany into a Catholic aesthetic for trauma. Both novels depict bomb explosions as traumatic but epiphanic moments of conversion in which faith arises belatedly through the process of writing itself. Narration gives the past a future in the possibility for a renewed faith in God.
