English Fiction & Prose Literature - 20th Century - Literary Criticism

Scandalous Truths: Essays by and about Susan Howatch

Name: Scandalous Truths: Essays by and about Susan Howatch
Author: Bruce Johnson
ISBN: 9781575910963

by Bruce Johnson (Editor), Charles A. Huttar (Editor), Susan Howatch

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Overview

Johnson (English, James Madison U.) and Huttar (English, Hope College) compile 13 essays about English novelist Susan Howatch and four essays by her, three of which were previously unpublished. They examine her career, and narrative technique, epistemology, writing style, and spirituality in her ecclesiastical novels, family sagas such as Penmarric, and gothic romances. Scholars also apply psychological and feminist theories to her works, and in her essays, Howatch discusses religion, genre, and writing and healing. Contributors are scholars and priests from the US and UK. Distributed by Associated University Presses. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Synopsis

Susan Howatch's global bestsellers have appeared regularly since the 1970s, but a radical shift in her subject matter in the 1980s and especially the 1990s made reviewers and then academics adjust their glasses and stare hard at her pages. Howatch began to take her loyal following of gothic and family-saga readers into unexpected psychological and theological depths, while taking to an extreme, with a serious-novel format, the experiments begun in her family sagas. She also introduced to her readers a character only half-alive in Trollope, the Anglican Church.