Michael R. Tobin, Georges Bernanos. The Theological Source of His Art

Michael R. TOBIN, Georges Bernanos. The Theological Source of His Art, Montréal / Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007, 232 p.
ISBN 9780773532328


RÉSUMÉ

French journalist, polemicist, and novelist Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) is perhaps best known through Robert Bresson's film adaptation of Journal d'un curé de campagne (winner of the Grand prix du roman de l'Académie française; published in English as Diary of a Country Priest), Francis Poulenc's operatic adaptation of Dialogues des Carmélites, his first novel Sous le soleil de Satan, and the essay Les Grands Cimetières sous la Lune.

Michael Tobin's study is part literary criticism, part biography. Tobin follows Bernanos and his family from France to Spain during the Civil War and then to Brazil and North Africa. He also provides a thematic synthesis of Bernanos' novels and his extensive body of non-fiction, demonstrating that one fundamental theological truth - the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ - was the unifying factor of Bernanos's entangled political and social criticism and the engine of his creative imagination.

Recent English translations of some of Bernanos' novels have sparked renewed interest in his work in North America. Georges Bernanos includes Tobin's translations of essential texts that have never before appeared in English.


TABLE DES MATIÈRES

Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction 3
PART ONE
1 A Creative Wellspring: The Source (1906–1940) 11
Castles in the Air 12
The Agnostic's Sermon 17
The Fallen Idol 36

2 A Novelist of Genius: The Art (1906–1940) 55
The Flawed Saint 56
The Mystical Saint 72
The Beloved Saint 88
The Apostate 106
The Literati 119
The Dead 139

PART TWO
3 A Prophetic Essayist: The Source (1940–1948) 161
4 A Spiritual Testament: The Art (1940–1948) 185

Conclusion 200
Bibliography 207
Index 215


BIOGRAPHIE

Michael R. Tobin is associate professor, French, St Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan, and a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Catholic Literature.