I have several books on order exploring issues of spirituality and faith in modern and contemporary literature.
In
The Pen and the Cross: Catholicism and English Literature, 1850-2000 Richard Griffiths examines why some of the most outstanding writers of recent times have been Catholics - often converts, such as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark and David Jones. Griffiths is concerned also to relate his story to movements on the continent and examines on his way the impact of French Catholic writers such as Huysmans, Peguy and Mauriac on their British counterparts and the influence of British Catholic writers such as Newman, Faber and Chesterton on Europe. Griffiths' book looks as though it should be one of the most comprehensive studies of the modern Catholic novel - a phenomenon about which I've posted here, here, here, here and here.
In
Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960 Amy Hungerford explores the work of major American writers, including
Allen Ginsberg,
Don DeLillo,
Cormac McCarthy,
Toni Morrison, and
Marilynne Robinson, and links their unique visions to the religious worlds they touch.
While in
Contemporary Fiction and Christianity Andrew Tate examines the work of more than a dozen contemporary Anglo-American novelists, including
John Updike,
Douglas Coupland,
John Irving,
Michèle Roberts, Don DeLillo and
Jim Crace. He shows how the 'sacred turn' in western culture is manifested within the novel from the 1980s to the present, paying particular attention to representations of such theological ideas as the miraculous, the heretical, the apocalyptic and the messianic.
Tate's book, which has arrived, looks to be a genuinely comprehensive survey taking in, in addition to those mentioned above:
Sara Maitland - "perhaps the most combatively theological British prose writer of the last 25 years";
Donna Tartt - "a 'constant tension' between her committed Christian faith ... and her 'vocation as a novelist";
James Robertson - his "sensitive and intensely theological novel
The Testament of Gideon Mack";
John L'Heureux - "a former Jesuit priest - examines the fragile division between faith and unbelief in
The Miracle;
Jonathan Coe - "suggests that the sacred is found in the midst of the profane";
David Maine - "
The Flood ... the first of his series of biblically themed novels";
Rhidian Brook - "a relatively rare novel of religious conversion";
Yann Martel - "challenges the notion that the journey of faith ... is necessarily detrimental to morally complex, demanding fiction";
Pat Barker - "Christ is a startling, defamiliarizing and unique presence";
Norman Mailer - "curiously reverent
The Gospel According to the Son";
Salley Vickers - "rewrites the myth of the angel in disguise"; Bernard Malamud - "reclaimed the tradition of the holy messenger"; Jodi Picoult and David Guterson - "focus on figures who claim to have seen and to have been spoken to by celestial beings"; Nick Hornby - explores miracle healings; Frederick Buechner - envisages a "liberating eternal or kairotic moment"; and Jon McGregor - "a celebration of the miraculous possibilities of the quotidian".
No survey, though, can be fully comprehensive and these don't seem to discuss the following:
Tom Davies - "the core of all his books is religious";
Shusaku Endo - "compelling but profoundly flawed Christian protagonists";
Catherine Fox - "an exploration of fanaticism and salvation";
Susan Howatch - "known for ... religious and philosophical themes";
John Grisham - "
The redemptive
power of faith is a strong theme in The Testament";
P.D. James - "a writer whose work is imbued with deep Christian convictions";
Nicholas Mosley - "novelist whose work [is] often philosophical and Christian in theology";
Morris West - "writer whose deep interest in and commitment to Catholicism provided the central
theme for nearly all of his thirty novels",
Niall Williams - "takes spiritual issues seriously – and continues to write compellingly about them" or Tim Winton - "'to ignore Winton's Christianity is to ignore the elephant in the room", among others.
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Bruce Springsteen -
Land of Hope and Dreams.
