Title: American Catholic arts and fictions : culture, ideology, aesthetics /
Authors: Giles, Paul.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press,
Year: 1992
Subjects: Catholic Church In literature.; American literature Catholic authors History and criticism.; Christian literature, American History and criticism.; Catholics United States Intellectual life; Authors, American Religious life.; Christianity and literature.; Catholics in literature.
Abstract: "In American Catholic Arts and Fictions, Paul Giles describes how secular transformations of religious ideas have helped to shape the style and substance of works by American writers, filmmakers, and artists from a Catholic background, such as Orestes Brownson, Theodore Dreiser, Mary McCarthy, Robert Mapplethorpe, Alfred Hitchcock, and Robert Altman. The book also explores how Catholicism was represented and mythologized by other American writers. By highlighting the recurring themes and preoccupations of American Catholic fictions, Giles challenges many of the accepted ideas about the centrality of romanticism to the American literary canon. He reconstructs the different social, historical, and philosophical contexts from which aesthetics in the "Catholic" tradition has emerged, and he shows how these stand in an oblique relationship to the assumptions of the American Enlightenment."--BOOK JACKET.
Contents: Methodological introduction : tracing the transformation of religion -- Stereotypes, inheritances, and immigrants -- Transcendentalism and "Catholicity" : Orestes Brownson -- Nineteenth-century myths of Catholic Europe -- Modernism, metaphor, and ambivalence -- Isolation and integration : Theodore Dreiser and James T. Farrell -- Conformity and parody : Scott Fitzgerald and The great Gatsby -- The analogical imagination : Allen Tate -- Interiorization of theology : Robert Lowell -- The weight of the cross : John Berryman -- The dialogue of blasphemy : Frank O'Hara -- The allure of iconography : Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe -- Ritual and burlesque : John Ford and Robert Altman -- Guilt and salvation : Alfred Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese -- The rewriting of theology : Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, Donald Barthelme -- The beatific vision : J.P. Donleavy and Jack Kerouac -- Social politics : J.F. Powers, John O'Hara, Mary McCarthy.