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Faith and Fiction
Christian Literature in America Today
 Anita Gandolfo

0-275-99196-2/978-0-275-99196-8

Description
Examines the current phenomenon of Christian Literature from The Da Vinci Code to the Left Behind series to reveal what these trends say about our culture, our faith, and our religious experiences.

Reviews:
-Gandolfo's wide survey and careful comparisons help make sense of the flood of Christian fiction, and her study is heartily recommended for all academic libraries. —Catholic Library World
-Gandolfo explores the contemporary American phenomenon of the popularity of Christian fiction in both the evangelical and mainstream publishing markets....Each of the book's eight chapters has extensive notes, and the work includes a bibliography and index. Highly recommended for religious and literature collections at college and university libraries. —MultiCultural Review
-Gandolpho assesses the new crop of fiction and its impact on American popular culture, including the recent blockbuster that had something to do with Da Vinci and the popular series about the Rapture. Along the way she shows how the rise of such pop and serious reading mirrors the preoccupation of the society, noting the particular elements of faith in the most popular products and applying them to recent cultural phenomena. —Reference & Research Book News
-Gandolfo offers a concise, insightful study that blends the sociology of current American religious culture, notably the impact of evangelicalism, with literary criticism of novelists addressing Christian themes. In a chapter titled Competing Paradigms, the author provides an excellent brief summary of the sociopolitical aspects of post-WW II Christianity in the US.... the present volume offers a balanced critique of works from the Christian right--for example, the Left Behind sequence of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins and the romance fiction of authors like Karen Kingsbury and Francine Rivers. The author focuses on how their more formulaic novels contrast with works of greater literary merit that offer more complex presentations of faith issue, e.g., work by John Updike, Oscar Hijuelos, and Barbara Kingsolver. This book will find a readership among students of literature, religion, and contemporary culture. Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. —Choice
About the Author
Anita Gandolfo is Professor Emeritus at the U.S. Military Academy where she was the founding Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and Professor of English. She is the author of Testing the Faith: The New Catholic Fiction in America (Greenwood, 1992), for which she won a Choice Outstanding Book award.
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0-275-99196-2 978-0-275-99196-8 Faith and Fiction $44.95    
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