Dear Colleagues,
University Press of the South is pleased to introduce a new book to your perusal:
(Un)Faithful Texts? Religion in French and Francophone Literature, from the 1780s to the 1980s. xi + 254 pp.
Edited by Paul Cooke and Jane Lee
The title of this volume is deliberately hesitant and interrogative since the essays it contains explore the interface between religion and literature in ways which highlight ambivalence and ambiguity. The contributions, provided by an international group of academics writing from varying degrees of faith and unbelief, and employing various critical and ideological approaches, demonstrate the fruitfulness of a heterogeneous approach to the relation between religion and modern literature within a French/Francophone context. This volume demonstrates how different writers from eighteenth-century deist Bernardin de Saint-Pierre to contemporary authors like Annie Ernaux and Jacqueline Saveria Huré have used the literary as a means of exploring and formulating a response to various religious issues. The literary text offers a matrix in which philosophical and spiritual experiment can take place, and the transcendent can be approached. The variety and wealth of the experiments examined here are a testimony to what a powerful theological and contemplative tool the literary can be. (Un)Faithful Texts? will be of interest to readers in modern French literature, cultural history, theology, and the ecclesiastical history of Quebec.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
1. Malcolm Cook, "The Role of the 'Solitaire' in the Fiction of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre"
2. Michael Glencross, "Pilgrims into Colonists: Representations of the Crusades in Early-Nineteenth-Century French Culture"
3. John Whittaker, "Romantic Poets' Treatment of the Bible: A Devotional Exercise?"
4. Jim Jackson, "Ultramontanes and Liberals in Nineteenth-Century Canada: The Role of Lamennais"
5. Lisa Downing, "Ecstasies and Agonies: The 'Oceanic Feeling', God and Sexuality in Baudelaire and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam"
6. Evelyne Hervy, "Pray and Praise: Religion and Humour in Rimbaud's 'Dévotion' and 'Génie'"
7. Mary Orr, "East or West? Flaubert's La Tentation de Saint Antoine, or the Question of Orthodoxy"
8. Paul Cooke, "René Crevel's Road to Atheism"
9. Marielle Wyns, "Conversion et traces du sacré dans l'écriture narrative coctélienne"
10. Dennis Drummond, "For a 'Theologically Correct' Mauriac: Sin in Le Noeud de Vipères"
11. Jane Lee, "Gide and the Divine Antagonist: The Role of Religious Belief in the Composition of Gide's Thésée"
12. Valerie Howells, "'Pas chrétien pour un sou?': A Reassessment of Camus's Religious Associations"
13. Lee Brotherson, "Alexandre Chenevert, God and the Absurd"
14. Susan Bainbrigge, "Writing the Atheist Self: The Autothanatographies of Simone de Beauvoir"
15. Pierre Hébert, "L'Eglise révoltée: La censure, les prêtres dissidents et l'exemple de Lionel Groulx"
16. Catherine O'Brien, "A Double Message: French Literary Responses to Mariology"
17. Myriam Watthee-Delmotte, "L'Absolu en contretype: La ritualisation de la violence dans la littérature narrative moderne"
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index
ISBN 1-889431-52-4