In recent years, there has been an explosion in the market for fiction on religious topics and themes, most notably Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. The variety of contemporary religious fiction and the publishing phenomenon surrounding it indicate that this literature transcends any overt religious meaning and is significant in its political and social implications; it is emblematic of the contemporary American Zeitgeist. Traditionally, literature is both mirror and lamp, reflecting the society that produces it and illuminating the values and interests of that society. Recognizing both of those perspectives, Gandolfo examines Christian literature's place in American culture today and explores the cultural meaning and significance of the wildly popular Christian fiction now available. The phenomenon surrounding Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code has led to a cottage industry of interpretations, attacks, and commentaries, but one thing is certain: the book has had an enormous impact on American society, culture, and religious understanding, not to mention the publishing industry, which scrambles to find similar religious books to feed to an eager public. But The Da Vinci Code is not the only book of its type on the market today. In recent years, there has been an explosion in the market for fiction on religious topics and themes, with an entire series devoted to the impending Rapture as described in the Left Behind series. Some fiction does not take an explicitly religious theme as these books do. Instead, writers like Andre Dubus and Ron Hansen imbue their creative work with spiritual and religious themes embedded in the everyday lives and concerns of their characters. Regardless of the specific approach, what is not in doubt is that American readers have made the authors of these works wealthy as bookstores cannot stock their shelves with enough copies. Why the recent surge of interest in Christian fiction? How does it reflect trends in our culture and our lives? How has it changed our society and our understanding of spirituality and religion? How accurate are these books in terms of the theology they espouse? The variety of contemporary religious fiction and the publishing phenomenon surrounding it indicate that this literature transcends any overt religious meaning and is significant in its political and social implications; it is emblematic of the contemporary American Zeitgeist. Traditionally, literature is both mirror and lamp, reflecting the society that produces it and illuminating the values and interests of that society. Recognizing both of those perspectives, Faith and Fiction examines Christian literature's place in American culture today and explores the cultural meaning and significance of the wildly popular Christian fiction now available.

Since 1965 there has been an explosion of fiction about being Catholic, clearly a result of confusions in the post-Vatican II church. American Catholic culture has suffered severe dislocations, and fiction has provided one way of coping with those dislocations. In Testing the Faith, Anita Gandolfo provides an overview of fiction about the American Catholic experience. The book considers emerging novelists such as Mary Gordon and Valerie Sayers and established writers like Paul Theroux. Among the popular writers covered are Andrew Greeley and William X. Keinzle. The volume also considers the emergence of new, young writers, such as Jeanne Schinto, Sheila O'Connor, and Philip Deaver. By analyzing patterns in contemporary Catholic fiction, Gandolfo shows both the shared interest these writers have in the Catholic experience and their individual perspectives on that experience. The book is the first to consider post-Vatican II Catholic literature, and will be of interest to those concerned with both the Catholic experience and current literature.

This volume contains almost all the letters that Charles Dodgson (alias Lewis Carroll) wrote to his publisher during a professional relationship that spanned the last thirty-five years of the Victorian era, a time when the reading public expanded a hundredfold, when the techniques of mass book production were being shaped, and when laws governing copyright and bookselling were first forged in the English-speaking world. Dodgson's correspondence touched critically on all these issues, and is a fascinating record of the contemporary evolution of publishing as well as of the production and distribution of his own immensely popular children's books and other works. At the same time it charts the growth of the House of Macmillan from modest beginnings to its status as a leading publisher. Professor Cohen and Professor Gandolfo have provided a useful introduction and explanatory notes to the letters.