Catholic literary revival

The Catholic literary revival is a term that has been applied to a movement towards explicitly Catholic allegiance and themes among leading literary figures in France[1] and England,[2] roughly in the century from 1860 to 1960. This often involved conversion to Catholicism or a conversion-like return to the Catholic Church. Due to the influence of Catholic literature from England in the United States,[3] the concept of "Catholic revival" is sometimes extended to include American authors such as Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, J. F. Powers and Flannery O'Connor.

France

French authors sometimes grouped in a Catholic literary revival include Léon Bloy, J. K. Huysmans, Charles Péguy,[4] Paul Claudel, Georges Bernanos and François Mauriac,[5] as well as the philosopher Jacques Maritain.[6]

England

The main figures who have been seen as constituting a revival of a leading Catholic presence in national literary life in England include John Henry Newman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh. Of these, Belloc was the only writer raised a Catholic, the others all being adult converts.

Although distinct, a movement towards explicit religious loyalty and themes in Anglican and Anglo-Catholic writers such as T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers is sometimes linked to the Catholic literary revival as a broader phenomenon.[7]

References

  1. ↑ Richard Griffiths, The Reactionary Revolution: The Catholic Revival in French Literature 1870-1914 (Constable, 1966).
  2. ↑ Ian Ker, The Catholic Revival in English Literature (1845–1961): Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003).
  3. ↑ Arnold Sparr, To Promote, Defend, and Redeem: The Catholic Literary Revival and the Cultural Transformation of American Catholicism, 1920-1960 (Greenwood Press, 1990).
  4. ↑ Brian Sudlow, Catholic Literature and Secularization in France and England, 1880-1914 (Manchester University Press, 2011).
  5. ↑ Martin Turnell, "A Catholic Literary Revival", The Spectator, 14 January 1966.
  6. ↑ The Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism, edited by Rajesh Heynickx and Jan De Maeyer (Leuven University Press, 2010).
  7. ↑ Joseph Pearce, Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age of Unbelief (Ignatius Press, 2006).
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