Literary Paths to Religious Understanding: Essays on Dryden, Pope, Keats, George Eliot, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and E.B. White

This highly readable book represents a unique approach to the controversial matter of the relations of literature and religion. From the minor seventeenth-century English tradition of “layman’s faiths,” Atkins moves seamlessly through a wide range of post-Reformation writers encountering and sometimes confronting institutional Christianity. After fresh, engaging discussions of John Dryden’s and Alexander Pope’s work come insightful, new readings of John Keats, George Eliot, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and perhaps most surprisingly, E.B. White. Atkins eschews linear argument in favor of a nuanced essayistic manner that elucidates texts and issues of immediate and lasting concern.