American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics

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Cambridge University Press, Jun 26, 1992 - Literary Criticism - 547 pages
Paul Giles describes how secular transformations of religious ideas have helped to shape the style and substance of works by American writers, filmmakers and artists from Catholic backgrounds such as Orestes Brownson, Theodore Dreiser, Mary McCarthy, Robert Mapplethorpe, Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Altman. The book also explores how Catholicism was represented and mythologized by other American writers. By highlighting the recurring themes and preoccupations of American Catholic fictions, Giles challenges many of the accepted ideas about the centrality of Romanticism to the American literary canon. He reconstructs the different social, historical, and philosophical contexts from which aesthetics in the "Catholic" tradition have emerged, and shows how these stand in an oblique relationship to the assumptions of the American Enlightenment.

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Contents

Stereotypes Inheritances and Immigrants
35
NineteenthCentury Myths of Catholic Europe
76
Modernism Metaphor and Ambivalence III
111
Theodore Dreiser
134
Scott Fitzgerald
169
Allen Tate
191
Robert Lowell
210
Andy Warhol
273
John Ford
296
Alfred Hitchcock
324
Katherine Anne
353
Jack Kerouac
394
J F Powers John OHara
427
Aesthetic Universalism
505
Index
533
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