BOOK NEWS: Examining modern Catholic authors' approach to suicide

Suicide in Modern Catholic Literature

By Martin Lockerd

Cascade Books, 2025

ISBN: 9781666786019

https://wipfandstock.com/9781666786019/suicide-in-modern-catholic-literature/

Suicide plays a major role in modern literature and the philosophy that informs it. For Catholic authors, who have always understood the act within the framework of sin and redemption, it carries a special significance. In the last century, Catholic literary figures as diverse as J.R.R. Tolkien and Walker Percy, Robert Hugh Benson and Muriel Spark, J.K. Huysmans and Graham Greene, wrestled with the problem of suicide in their work and produced art that confronts the despair so common in modern existence. As suicide rates continue to increase across the developed world and entire nations embrace and expand legalized assisted suicide, this book draws readers back to Catholic literature as a resource for understanding and perhaps even resisting this trend.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

“Martin Lockerd’s book enters with profound compassion into the contemporary problem of suicide and the causes for it, which lie far deeper than a secular therapeutic culture can address. Starting with Michel Houellebecq’s diagnosis of a world suffering hopelessly from the death of God, Lockerd goes on to explore the wisdom of Catholic writers from Greene to Percy who suffer the desolation of the postmodern world and yet find a way to belief and hope.” —Glenn C. Arbery, professor of humanities, Wyoming Catholic College

“Suicide is too serious to be left to the psychologists. ‘Chemical imbalance’ cannot do justice to the deeper meanings of melancholy. Steeped in philosophical foundations and theological revelations that stave off sentimental, presumptive mercies, Martin Lockerd looks to literature lit with a Catholic vision to interrogate, with sustained sympathy, what attracts us to the abyss of self-immolation. Considering a richly eccentric range of authors—from Tolkien to Houellebecq—he weighs what is found wanting in modernity to diagnose a range of causes that tempt too many to jump to their deaths. Even as he grants the gains of good psychology, Lockerd avoids reducing literature to another therapeutic tool. Rather, drawing from literature’s capacity to form our feelings and grant them catharsis, he manifests the distinctive potencies of great and good books to help heal the sickness unto death.” —Joshua Hren, author of the novels Infinite Regress and Blue Walls Falling Down

Martin Lockerd is an associate professor and division dean at the University of St. Thomas, Houston. He joined UST in 2022 to help guide a renewed core curriculum in the Catholic liberal arts tradition. Dr. Lockerd received his BA from the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts and his PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin. His scholarship has appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, the Yeats/Eliot Review, Mythlore, and Logos. His first monograph, Decadent Catholicism and the Making of Modernism, was published in 2020.

Book News: Graham Greene's aesthetics and form

Between Form and Faith: Graham Greene and the Catholic Novel

BY MARTYN SAMPSON

Fordham UP, 2021
ISBN: 9780823294671
https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823294671/between-form-and-faith/

What is a “Catholic” novel? This book analyzes the fiction of Graham Greene in a radically new manner, considering in depth its form and content, which rest on the oppositions between secularism and religion. Sampson challenges these distinctions, arguing that Greene has a dramatic contribution to add to their methodological premises. Chapters on Greene’s four “Catholic” novels and two of his “post-Catholic” novels are complemented by fresh insight into the critical importance of his nonfiction. The study paints an image of an inviting yet beguilingly complex literary figure.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

• Using a provocative blend of literary theory and recent Christian theology, this book upholds the radical intersection of the religious and the secular in the fiction of Graham Greene, one of England's finest writers.
• Explores Greene according to issues of form and content in an in-depth and radically new way. While much critical attention has focused on the thematics of Greene’s fiction, whether religious or secular, its form has not received sustained analysis.
• Demonstrates and dramatizes how Greene can actually have a significant impact on polarized critical methodologies. This serves to raise the status not only of Greene, but also potentially that of other religious writers, too.
• Deconstructs different kinds of prejudice among critics and readers whose dispositions are secular or religious in nature, Catholic and otherwise by considering how fiction relates not only to broad intellectual debates, but also to the minutiae of human relationships.

"Martyn Sampson expands our understanding of both Graham Greene’s Catholic imagination and the status of theological aesthetics by focusing on the formal dimensions of Greene’s literary production over the easily abstracted theological content of his work. Sampson uses the term ‘impulses’ to interrogate the imaginative pressures of faith, belief, and doubt that drove Greene’s work throughout his long literary career. He argues, in the end, that Greene’s conception of what a Catholic novel might be is more about a genre that brings the secular and the religious closer than apart, an embrace of possibility and risk at the heart of the human condition. What is remarkable in this study is Sampson’s deep reading of the discourses of critical theory placed in conversation with the vast range of Greene’s scholarship over the past decade. Between Form and Faith is an impressive achievement" — Mark Bosco, S.J., Georgetown University, author of Graham Greene's Catholic Imagination

"Here is a book of genuine intellectual heft. In his analysis of Graham Greene, Martyn Sampson brings together the insights of contemporary critical theory with those of modern theology to turn the notion of a ‘Catholic Novel’ on its head, treating faith not as a body of beliefs external to the fictions and so to be affirmed or denied, but as a dimension of the novels’ imagined worlds. This insightful and innovative book should become essential reading for literary and theological scholars." — Richard Greene, University of Toronto

Martyn Sampson earned his PhD from the University of the West of England, Bristol, where he taught English. He served as director of the 2018 and 2019 Graham Greene International Festivals.