The broken estate
Subtitle: essays on literature and belief
By: James Wood.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1999
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 270
Subjects: Religion and literature.; Fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism.
Description: "This book recalls an era when criticism could change the way we look at the world. In the tradition of Matthew Arnold and Edmund Wilson, James Wood reads literature expansively, always pursuing its role and destiny in our lives. In a series of essays about such figures as Melville, Flaubert, Chekhov, Virginia Woolf, and Don DeLillo, Wood relates their fiction to questions of religious and philosophical belief.

He suggests that the steady ebb of the sea of faith has much to do with the revolutionary power of the novel, as it has developed over the last two centuries. To read James Wood is to be shocked into both thinking and feeling how great our debt to the novel is."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes index.