The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists (O'Connor, Percy, Updike, DeVries)

UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS

Ralph C. Wood

— Balancing theology with literary criticism, this work explores the comic vision in the works of four American novelists, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, John Updike and Peter De Vries.

"Ralph C. Wood's research offers an enlivening approach to the study of literary art and faith. He unabashedly argues that eschatological grace is the impetus for earthly humor and joy... [and] admirably makes valid connections between the comedy of the Gospel and the comedic vision espoused by four American novelists."— American Literature

Table of Contents — Walker Percy Chapters

7. Walker Percy as a Catholic Existentialist

I. Will Percy as Model and Nemesis
II. The Lure and Peril of Catonism
III. Scientific Humanism and Its Existentialist Critique
IV. Human Speech and the Human Longing for God

8. Percy as the Satirist Satirized: The Moviegoer

I. Binx Bolling as a Man in Conscious Despair
II. The Hierarchy of Unconscious Despair
III. The Emptiness of a Purely Self-Conscious Life
IV. The Human Summons to Transcendent Grace
V. The Life of Faith as Cosmic Hope

Ralph C. Wood has served as University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University since 1998. He previously served for 26 years on the faculty of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he became the John Allen Easley Professor of Religion in 1990. He has also taught at Samford University in Birmingham, at Regent College in Vancouver, and at Providence College in Rhode Island. At Baylor, his main appointment is in the Religion Department; he also teaches in the Great Texts program, as well as the Department of English. He serves as an editor-at-large for the Christian Century and as an editorial board member for both the Flannery O'Connor Review and Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review.

Publication Date: 1988