Comedy of Redemption - by Ralph C Wood (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Focusing on specific theological issues in the work of Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, John Updike, and Peter De Vries, The Comedy of Redemption boldly unites Christian faith in dialogue with comic fiction. Ralph C. Wood demonstrates that all four writers are comic artists in the theological sense of the term, although their fiction echoes the laughter of the Gospel in radically different ways.

Wood explores tragedy and comedy in terms of theological as well as literary categories. After a brief discussion of the tragic vision as it bears on the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, he offers an interpretation of Karl Barth as a theologian of the Christian comedy of redemption. Barth's theology is seen as disclosing what is profoundly comic in God's reconciliation of the world unto himself in Jesus Christ. Barth thus becomes-against the popular view that he is a despiser of culture--the basis for a positive theological estimate of contemporary literature. His theology also serves to reclaim the eschatological gladness of Christian faith amid the gathering despair of the late modern age.

In light of these claims, Wood then offers literary interpretations of O'Connor, Percy, Updike, and De Vries. In a variety of ways, and not without ambiguities, there are reverberations of the Gospel to be heard within these four contemporary American writers. Sometimes against their own willful purpose, the rumor of revelation resounds within their fiction. Such literary analogues of the Gospel serve to demonstrate that the ear of faith, having first heard the redeeming comedy in scripture and the church, can also hear its parabolic echo in some of the best comic fiction written in our time.

Review Quotes

"Ralph C. Wood allots Flannery O'Connor two chapters in his unflaggingly devout new book. (The other three writers are Walker Percy, John Updike, and Peter De Vries.) Those chapters contain some of the best-informed and most discerning theological criticism O'Connor has yet received." --The New York Review of Books

"Ralph C. Wood's research offers an enlivening approach to the study of literary art and faith. He unabashedly argues that eschatological grace is the impetus for earthly humor and joy...[and] admirably makes valid connections between the comedy of the Gospel and the comedic vision espoused by four American novelists." --American Literature

"This is a learned, discerning study of the writers in question, and it puts to rest the platitude that theology is irrelevant to contemporary culture." --John S. Reist, Jr., Professor of Christianity and Literature, Hillsdale College

"Wood's elucidation of the comic vision in the works of these American novelists is cause for cheer in the Christian community. Wood is a writer of uncommon perception and sensibility." --The Christian Century

About the Author

Ralph C. Wood has served as University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor since 1998. He previously served for 26 years on the faculty of Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he became the John Allen Easley Professor of Religion in 1990. He has also taught at Samford University in Birmingham, at Regent College in Vancouver, and at Providence College in Rhode Island. At Baylor, his main appointment is in the Religion Department; he also teaches in the Great Texts program as well as the Department of English. He serves as an editor-at-large for the Christian Century and as an editorial board member for both the Flannery O'Connor Review and Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review.