University of Delaware Press / Rowman & Littlefield (2018)
Narrative Faith engages with the dynamics of doubt and faith to consider how literary works with complex structures explore different moral visions. The study considers a literary petite histoire in which faith is problematized in two ways—in the themes presented in the story, and the strategies used to tell that story—leading readers to doubt the narrators. Setting off with Dostoevsky’s Demons (1872), a novel that has captivated and confounded critics and readers for well over a century, the study examines Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947) and Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Penitent (1973/83), works by twentieth-century authors who intensify questions of faith through narrators that generate doubt, and extend these questions into the current era. The book’s last section looks beyond narrative inquiry to consider themes of confession and revision that appear in all three novels and open onto horizons beyond faith and doubt—to hope.
