| This dissertation explores the rhetorical situation of the avowedly Christian literary artist in the post-Christian twentieth century, the first period in which it is more remarkable for a literary artist deliberately to profess Christianity than to reject it. I argue that Christian literary discourse, both in its articulation and reception, occupies a crucial site of lay interpolation of what it means to be religious in a modern secular world, and of how the complex and changing boundaries of religion and culture are negotiated. I pursue this argument from Britain to America, from high to low culture, from World War I to the present, by looking at T. S. Eliot (whose critical and poetic explorations of culture's relationship to Christianity help establish and problematize my discussion), C. S. Lewis (who elicits an immense, various readership, but whose intellectual and religious identity becomes split and altered among his different audiences), and contemporary evangelical romance fiction (a genre which shuns the explicit prurience of mainstream romance as it embraces its marketing practices and deeper implicit values). |
