Product Description: During the Second Vatican Council, the Roman Catholic Church went through a period of liberal reform under the stewardship of Popes John XXIII and Paul VI. Successive popes sharply reversed course, enforcing conservative ideological values and silencing progressive voices in the Church...read more

In Conversations with Mary Gordon, Mary Gordon reveals her intellectual vigor, her freewheeling humor, and her strongly held opinions on issues ranging from sex to contemporary literature and gender theory. With candor, she details her departure from and eventual return to her Irish-Catholic heritage. Since the resounding success of her first novel, Final Payments (1978), Gordon has been one of America's most popular and controversial writers. She has published five novels, three novellas, two collections of essays, a short story collection, a memoir, a biography of Joan of Arc, and dozens of book reviews. Conversations with Mary Gordon joins the writer in talks with Terry Gross, Charlie Rose, Edmund White, Madison Smartt Bell, Patrick H. Samway, and others. Nine of these interviews have never before been published. Her many interviewers know her as a wonderful, gregarious, passionate, and articulate interviewee. This is surprising, considering that Gordon once insisted during an interview that "interviews are absolutely my idea of hell." The clarity and conviction evident in her writing are matched by the same qualities in her conversation. She explores her favorite novelists--Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Ford Madox Ford--and talks at length about how and why she uses Roman Catholicism as metaphor and symbol in her own writing. Freely discussing the autobiographic influences in her work, she is open about the huge influence of her father. David Gordon, a journalist and scholar, died when Mary was seven. Mary loved him dearly, and she discusses his influence on her life and writing, as well as her profound disillusionment with him when she discovered the self-hatred and ultra-conservatism of his writing. Her utter devotion to him in early interviews gives way to disillusionment, rejection, and, ultimately, acceptance. This collection allows the reader to trace the roots--both literary and autobiographical--of one of America's most fiercely intelligent and thoughtful writers. Alma Bennett is an associate professor of humanities and English at Clemson University.

Product Description: Catholicism has traditionally embraced both a clearly delineated belief in God and an unique view of human nature. Over the past half century, the traditional Catholic concept of man as a creature in an individual relationship with his Creator ("vertical man") has been challenged by many dissatisfied theologians and writers...read more

Product Description: Muriel Spark converted to Roman Catholicism in 1954 and began her career as a novelist in the same year. This study examines her satire and looks at characters both demonic and daimonic, the figure of Job, the genre of spiritual autobiography and the uses of language as a vehicle of possibility...read more

Product Description: Brideshead Revisited: The Past Redeemed (Twayne's Masterwork Studies)