Breaking the Fall
Subtitle: Religious Readings of Contemporary Fiction
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
Published: December 1995
Language: eng
Number of pages: 198
ISBN-13: 9780664256302
First sentence: In a story entitled 'The Hitchhiking Game' the Czech writer Milan Kundera describes a young couple setting out for their two-week vacation in the Tatras Mountains.
Description: Modern literary criticism has virtually neglected to interpret contemporary narrative fiction, poetry, and drama from a distinctly religious perspective. In this book, Robert Detweiler, the premier exponent of theology-based literary criticism, redresses this lack by presenting a clear and comprehensive study of religious themes in contemporary fiction. He applies the latest critical treatments to the study of religious themes in various works, including works by Margaret Atwood, Jorge Luis Borges, Annie Dillard, Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera, Walker Percy, and John Updike. By doing so, he keenly demonstrates that there are many ways to conduct a religious reading of a text.