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Books by Michael Giffin
Jane Austen and Religion
Palgrave Macmillan
(2002)
Austen's novels are commentaries that present a common discourse of period. Her heroines are prototypes in an interrogation of neoclassicism and romanticism. Each heroine is given an affinity with reason or feeling. 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 restoration.
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 their literature if we exclude it from philosophy and theology, or separate it into different national or post-colonial literatures, because it belongs to a world that is more open than the closed world of cultural studies, literary theory, or social theory.
Patrick White and the Religious Imagination
Edwin Mellen Press
(1999)
Throughout his literary career, Patrick White believed western civilization 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 each protagonist a horizon from western religious experience: Primitive, Classical, Jewish, 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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