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: Muriel Spark, the literary shapeshifter

Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark

By James Bailey

Princeton UP, June 2026

ISBN: 

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691290171/like-a-cat-loves-a-bird

Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was one of literature’s great shapeshifters. That mercurial quality is found in her strange, brilliant, cruel novels—with their plots featuring a cast of elderly characters receiving telephone calls from Death, the devil going clubbing in Peckham, and a fascist schoolmistress leading her coterie of girls astray—but it is also true of her as a person. As sly, nimble, and elegant as Spark’s own work, Like a Cat Loves a Bird offers a thrilling new perspective on a remarkable life and career that spanned much of the twentieth century.

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.

From Spark’s childhood in Edinburgh to her final years in Tuscany—via South Africa, London, New York, and Rome—James Bailey traces a light-footed journey around the world and through the novelist’s strange and magnificent books. The result is an irresistible story of transformation, wit, and fierce determination—and a passionate case for this vital modern artist.

“Bailey’s slippery Spark is chaotic, complex, often hilarious, and constantly shapeshifting. His kaleidoscopic portrait illuminates Spark’s life and work from every angle, yet—crucially—allows her the freedom she craved to confound and elude those who would try to pin her down. This is a deeply stylish, astute, and illuminating biography of a fascinating writer.”—Francesca Wade, author of Square Haunting and Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife

“Utterly charming. A book as elegant, sharp-witted, and mischievous as its subject. If you love literary biography, you’ll feel like the cat that got the cream.”—Clare Pollard, author of Delphi: A Novel

James Bailey is a writer and researcher who holds a PhD in literature and is the author of Muriel Spark’s Early Fiction.

Book News: Reappraising Muriel Spark's early works

Muriel Spark's Early Fiction: Literary Subversion and Experiments with Form

BY JAMES BAILEY

Edinburgh UP, March 2021

ISBN: 9781474475969 hardback

9781474475990 ePub

9781474475983 PDF

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-muriel-spark-s-early-fiction.html

A compelling reappraisal of Spark’s approach to literary experimentation

• Offers a distinctive reappraisal of Spark’s fiction, which challenges the rigid critical framework that has long been applied to her writing
• Interrogates how Spark’s literary innovations work to facilitate moments of subversive satire and gendered social critique
• Presents nuanced re-readings of some of Spark’s major works, as well as lesser-discussed texts such as her only stage play, Doctors of Philosophy, and early short stories
• Draws upon detailed archival research to offer a unique insight into the social contexts and personal preoccupations that informed Spark’s writing

This book presents a detailed critical analysis of a period of significant formal and thematic innovation in Muriel Spark’s literary career. Spanning the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, it identifies formative instances of literary experimentation in texts including The Comforters, The Driver’s Seat and The Public Image, with an emphasis on metafiction and the influence of the nouveau roman. As the first critical study to draw extensively on Spark’s vast archives of correspondence, manuscripts and research, it provides a unique insight into the social contexts and personal concerns that dictated her fiction.

Muriel Spark’s Early Fiction is a magnificent achievement, bursting with revealing and original insights into Spark’s fiction and the enduring preoccupations and working methods of this most singular author. The result is a welcome addition to the process Spark scholars have embarked upon in recent years: extricating (or ‘desegregating’) the author from the various literary-critical categories that once confined her. Bailey’s approach is flexible and multi-faceted by contrast, and draws on an impressively extensive use of previously unexamined archival material. The reader is provided with illuminating explorations of ‘instances of narrative daring’ during the first two decades of Spark’s career which range from under-examined early short stories to key texts such as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and The Driver’s Seat, and place the emphasis on her enduring commitment to highlight the ways women become inscribed in oppressive cultural narratives. It is a rich and readable monograph which lives up to its ambition to establish a more complex and appropriate framework to discuss Spark in our current critical era, and will therefore be essential reading for those embarking on future studies of one of the most brilliant and unusual writers of the second half of the Twentieth Century.

– Bran Nicol, University of Surrey

James Bailey is honorary research fellow in English literature at the University of Sheffield. He is the co-editor, with Emma Young, of British Women Short Story Writers: The New Woman to Now (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) as well as author of articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Contemporary Women’s Writing and European Journal of English Studies.