Title: The broken estate
Subtitle: essays on literature and belief
First published: 1999
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.
Subjects: History and criticism, Fiction, Religion and literature, New York Times reviewed, Religion in literature, Literature, history and criticism, History and criticism. 650/3: 0, Fiction, history and criticism, 20th century
Time periods: 20th century, 19th century
LC classification: PN3351 .W66 1999