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Books
Jane Austen and Religion
Palgrave Macmillan
(2002)
Austen's novels represent a common discourse of her period. Her heroines are prototypes in an interrogation of neoclassicism and romanticism. Each heroine is given an affinity with reason (sense) or feeling (sensibility). Each novel describes their struggle to achieve an ideal balance. Austen's stories are about reordering the disordered personality, family, community, and church. To the Georgians, these are related in an organic way, since every person and institution lives under the sign of the fall and is in need of soteria, a Greek word from the Christian scriptures, which means both physical wholeness and metaphysical salvation.
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An Introduction to Religion in the English Novel
Edwin Mellen Press
(2000)
Many literary authors are influenced by a zeitgeist that hasn't changed significantly since the enlightenment, even though their novels appear in different styles: neoclassical, romantic, modernist, post-modernist. It's easy to misrepresent this literature by assuming it's anti-metaphysical simply because it interrogates classical metaphysics, or by separating it into exclusive national or post-colonial literatures.
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Patrick White and the Religious Imagination
Edwin Mellen Press
(1999)
Throughout his distinguished literary career, Patrick White believed western civilisation was dying because of the tensions the enlightenment created within the western imagination. In testing this belief, he explored "the disturbing marriage between life and imagination". He gave most of his protagonists a horizon from western religious experience: pre-classical or Dionysian, classical or Apollonian, Jewish, or Christian. Their given horizon determines how they're able, or unable, to relate to self or world or other, and their life is lived out according to its logic.
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