Introduction

Abstract

AbstractTo make sense of the presence of Catholic devotionalism in America’s putatively Protestant mainstream fiction, the Introduction recovers the mythopoetic criticism of Leslie A. Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, long-remembered only in gender and racial terms, to marshal his distinction between Protestant sentimentalism, in which Pauline anti-sexuality yields sexless households and male bonding, and the sanctification of passion in the Catholic Mediterranean, which re-sexualizes Mary and compulsively seeks redemption in transgression. Whereas Fiedler assumed that Roman Catholicism lost the literary battle for the American psyche, Transgression & Redemption argues that “the Protestant temptation to Marian Catholicism” anticipated by Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter really gets going by century’s end and culminates in the great American modern(ist) novels of the 1920s. It begins by identifying the core storytelling that dissents from Emersonian transcendentalism and that has dominated America’s novelistic canon since its inception: what a previous generation identifies as “melodramas of beset sexuality” that must now be seen, in a return to religious accountability, as martyr tales of forbidden love. Then the big reveal: it turns out that where there is sexual transgression in the American canon, there are almost always signs of redemption—and those signs are themselves almost always Catholic. The introduction proceeds from recent critical trends to outline further crucial changes in reading practices—leveraging female devotions against male delusion, thinking both/and instead of either/or, cultivating material immanence over transcendental symbolism—that prepare the way for comprehending the once-and-still-fearful religious Other central to the American literary imagination.