CHRIST & APOLLO: Dimensions of the Literary Imagination

**This is an exceptionally fine book on the relationship of literature and the literary imagination to human life. The author, whose book on television and the movies, The Image Industries, has won wide critical acclaim and gained for its publishers an award for creative Catholic publishing, is a Jesuit priest who excels as a writer, theologian, philosopher, scholar, artist, teacher and literary critic. All of his talents are used to the full in the work under consideration. This volume contains unusual insights into the meaning, for literature and for life, of concrete experience, - time, tragedy, comedy, freedom, the analogy of being, the theological imagination and Christ Himself. Illuminating criticism, illustrated by a wealth of examples, is expressed with regard to the typical defects of certain forms of the modern literary imagination. Incidental to all this, the book actually sketches the outline of a sturdy spirituality connotative of both sanity and sanctity. The author's central theme is that both life and literature must find insight, beauty, even God Himself, not by some sort of pseudo-mystical leap into a vague infinity or by some sort of ""magic"", but by remaining with the definite, limited, temporal, concrete dimensions of the finite. An original work of the highest caliber, this book will stimulate the literary critic, the literary artist, the professor or student of literature and the generalist. Its appeal extends beyond the strictly Catholic market.