AustLit

'Vincent Pecora’s learned and challenging book on the later years of the European novel begins by rooting his thesis firmly in the intellectual depths of the 20th century and its sense of the secularisation of European thought in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, the sweeping theses of Hans Blumenberg in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, and the literary thought of Erich Auerbach. All is then brought together in the context of the novel and its reflection of the haunting afterlife of Reformed theology in the processes of endless ‘secularization’. We cannot, it seems, escape Christian theology’s often grim consequences, with their roots in the theology of St. Augustine and their later workings in the thought of Jean Calvin.' (Introduction)