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THE WALKER PERCY PROJECT
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WHITSTON PUBLISHING
Lewis A. Lawson
— "Taken together, these pieces document Lawson's own highly intersubjective encounters with the characters who people Percy's world. Lawson knows the workings of that world in a way few can match . . . (he) writes a well-crafted and unfailingly lucid criticism." –SEWANEE REVIEW
Walker Percy's novels and essays, like those of Saul Bellow, reflect an erudition more typical of the European tradition than of the American. His characters and settings are distinctly Southern, but his thematic concerns venture from Cartesian doubt to such contemporary moral quandaries as euthanasia and post-apocalyptic life. Eminently readable, his novels yield their riches more readily to the well-informed reader.
In this collection of his essays, Lewis A. Lawson, Professor of English at the University of Maryland, provides a very useful guide to the central concerns of Percy's early novels. There is a generous selection of commentaries on specific novels — The Moviegoer, Love in the Ruins, Lancelot — as well as more general discussions of biographical and meta-physical issues that pervade all of Percy's work. Whatever the topic, Lawson's criticism is informed, lucid, and contagiously enthusiastic. Fans, scholars, and the general reader will all find the essays in this collection informative and most helpful in achieving a serious appraisal of Walker Percy's oeuvre.
Table of contentsLewis A. Lawson is a Professor of English at the University of Maryland, is the co-editor of Conversations with Walker Percy and More Conversations with Walker Percy and the author of Another Generation: Southern Fiction Since World War II (all publications of the University Press of Mississippi).
Publication Date: April 1, 1988