Completing the survey begun in Lams' Cornish Trilogy volume, Aspects of Robertson Davies' Novels discusses the Salterton and Deptford trilogies along with Davies' last two novels, Murther & Walking Spirits and The Cunning Man. The apprentice effort Tempest-Tost and the journeyman's success Leaven of Malice were followed by Davies' first genuinely fine novel, A Mixture of Frailties, the story of a talented Salterton girl who becomes a world-famous soprano. The Deptford trilogy is discussed in terms of Northrop Frye's «confession» form as it appears in Fifth Business, and in variations of that form in The Manticore and World of Wonders. Although Davies' Jungian enthusiasms produced certain flaws to which readers have objected, Murther & Walking Spirits is by no means a failure; it is best understood as an implicit spiritual history of Canada which is adumbrated in the generational experience of a single Canadian family. The Cunning Man concludes Davies' career with a narrative as rewardingly complex as any of the Cornish trilogy novels.
Focusing upon the arguments Newman uses to define Catholicism against the hostility of English protestants, this book is a reader's guide to the books Newman published soon after his own conversion: Mixed Congregations; Difficulties of Anglicans; Present Position of Catholics, and his two novels. While the arguments advanced in Difficulties of Anglicans and Present Position of Catholics are confrontationally direct, his novels Loss and Gain and Callista respond to the attacks of Elizabeth Harris' From Oxford to Rome and Charles Kingsley's Hypatia by the indirection which typifies Newman's fictional rhetoric.
Robertson Davies's Cornish Trilogy: A Reader's Guide is the first book-length study of Davies's best work: The Rebel Angels, What's Bred in the Bone, and The Lyre of Orpheus. In The Rebel Angels, Maria and Darcourt alternate in
Far from being a random collection, the six volumes of Anglican sermons that John Henry Newman published between 1834 and 1842 were selected and thematically arranged to create a unified literary structure, one with the form and function of a prose georgic. Like the classical exemplars composed by Hesiod, Lucretius, and Virgil, Newman's Anglican Georgic offers moral reflections on human conduct in light of human possibility and addresses the existence, intervention, and benign or hostile will of the gods. As this book shows, Newman is equally concerned to embolden his audience for the practice of authentic Christianity and to warn them against the age's schismatic preference for private religious emotion over revealed doctrine.
Building upon the evidence that John Henry Newman's Parochial Sermons is a georgic (Lams, 2004), the current book defines and discusses the visionary georgic, a subset of the genre whose exemplars include Lucretius' De rerum natura and Wordsworth's The Prelude. Newman's visionary georgic defends Christian revelation against the rationalistic subjectivism that tended to displace religious faith by Wordsworthian self-exploration, leading to the Victorian redefinition of literature as secular scripture. Subjects discussed include Newman's relations with readers, his sermonic rhetoric, and his analysis of doctrines celebrated in the Church's liturgy.
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