Walker Percy
download cover image ►

Walker Percy

Books of Revelations

Title Details

Pages: 346

Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in

Formats

Paperback

Pub Date: 09/01/2010

ISBN: 9-780-8203-3793-7

List Price: $34.95

Walker Percy

Books of Revelations

Skip to

  • Description
  • Reviews

In Walker Percy: Books of Revelations, Gary M. Ciuba examines how Percy’s apocalyptic vision inspires the structure, themes, and strategies of his fiction. This book explores the unity of the southern novelist’s fiction by focusing on its religious and artistic design—one of the first studies to approach Percy’s work from this perspective.

Ciuba considers Percy’s six published novels—The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, The Second Coming, and The Thanatos Syndrome—and also offers the first extended critical analysis of his unpublished work “The Gramercy Winner.” Although the novels are often seen as increasingly satiric jeremiads about the possible doom of America, Ciuba argues that Percy’s fiction is principally shaped by a demythologized and partially realized form of eschatology. This apocalyptic vision has less to do with the end of the external world than with the demise of the protagonists’ internal worldviews. According to Ciuba, Percy does more than offer direly comic warnings about the end of the world; he shows how the world actually ends and then may begin again in the everyday lives and extraordinary loves of his astonished seers.

Ciuba’s work is valuable in pointing out the many connections between revelation and Revelation, between man-made disaster and Apocalypse, and between the word and the Word.

Christianity and Literature

Ciuba’s emphasis on Percy’s apocalyptics effectively traces the thematic and stylistic ligature that unifies his work, so that, by the end of Walker Percy: Books of Revelations, the reader feels as if he or she has actually glimpsed the figure in the carpet that is woven into the fabric of Percy’s fiction.

Mississippi Quarterly

Ciuba, a recognized authority on the works of Percy, has written a complete and penetrating book that will set the standard for all future Percy scholarship.

Virginia Quarterly Review

A masterful and elegantly written analysis. It is a very learned book that combines biblical expertise and astute literary analysis to produce arguments full of rich insights.

Modern Age

About the Author/Editor

GARY M. CIUBA is a professor of English at Kent State University. He is the author ofDesire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction: Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Walker Percy which won the C. Hugh Holman Award in 2008 for best work in southern literary studies.