Overview

Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction is a critical study of classic American novels. Ferraro returns to Hawthorne's closet of secreted sin to reveal The Scarlet Letter as a deviously psychological turn on the ancient Meditererranean Catholic folk tales of female wanderlust, cuckolding priests, and demonic revenge. This lights the way to explore what Ferraro calls ""the Protestant temptation to Marian Catholicism"" in seven modern American masterworks, including Chopin's The Awakening, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Cather's The Professor's House, and Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction explores stories of forbidden passion and sacrificial violence, with ultra-radiant women (and sometimes men) at their focus. It examines how these novels speak to readers across religious and social spectrums, generating an inclusive mode of address and near-universal relevance. Ferraro breaks the codes of contemporary criticism in his thematic focus and critical style, going beyond Protestantism and even Judeo-Christian Orthodoxy itself. Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction encourages the attentive reader to think about the American imagination, the myriad arts of writing about the passion plays of love, and even our canonical structures for reading and thinking about literature in new ways.

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9780198863052

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Reviews

There are academic books that spur readers to think about and look at literary works from an 'ex-centric' standpoint with regards to the established theoretical framework that surrounds them. These are also the books that compel us to go back to those novels, poems, stories as slow readers, searching for clues and tunes we might have not considered previously...Thomas J. Ferraro's Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction is one of those books, and its flamboyant and beautifully crafted cover immediately alerts readers to its unorthodox and thought-provoking content, leading them to a journey across modern US fiction as seen through the lens of Marian Catholicism * Chiara Patrizi, Adjunct Professor of Anglo-American Literature at the University of Bologna and at the University of Trieste, Iperstoria Journal of American and English Studies *

There are academic books that spur readers to think about and look at literary works from an 'ex-centric' standpoint with regards to the established theoretical framework that surrounds them. These are also the books that compel us to go back to those novels, poems, stories as slow readers, searching for clues and tunes we might have not considered previously ... Thomas J. Ferraro's Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction is one of those books, and its flamboyant and beautifully crafted cover immediately alerts readers to its unorthodox and thought provoking content, leading them to a journey across modern US fiction as seen through the lens of Marian Catholicism. * Chiara Patrizi, Iperstoria * There are academic books that spur readers to think about and look at literary works from an 'ex-centric' standpoint with regards to the established theoretical framework that surrounds them. These are also the books that compel us to go back to those novels, poems, stories as slow readers, searching for clues and tunes we might have not considered previously...Thomas J. Ferraro's Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction is one of those books, and its flamboyant and beautifully crafted cover immediately alerts readers to its unorthodox and thought-provoking content, leading them to a journey across modern US fiction as seen through the lens of Marian Catholicism * Chiara Patrizi, Adjunct Professor of Anglo-American Literature at the University of Bologna and at the University of Trieste, Iperstoria Journal of American and English Studies *

Author Information

Thomas J. Ferraro is Professor of English at Duke University. He writes on literature, film, and the performing arts, and is the author of Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America (NYU, 2005), Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in 20th-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 1993), the editor of Catholic Lives, Contemporary America (Duke University Press, 1997), and a contributor to The Columbia History of the American Novel, Scribner's Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History, and The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature.

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