In Praise of Blood Sports and Other Essays

These nine articles by a Vanderbilt University professor ( Death by Melancholy ) reprinted from Sewanee Review , Southern Review , etc., take as their underlying theme the element of the sacred in literature. Commentaries focus on the religious and social attitudes of Andrew Lytle, Cormac McCarthy, Bobbie Ann Mason, Marion Montgomery, Flannery O'Connor, Allen Tate, Peter Taylor and Richard Weaver, including their associations with Catholicism and Southern agrarianism. Other pieces discuss Joseph Conrad's Secret Agent , Elizabeth Bowen's sense of place and the failure of her later books, Evelyn Waugh's Catholicism and the religious impulse in William Golding's novels. The title essay, the one new piece, explores the sense of the sacred in the literature of Caroline Gordon and Andrew Lytle, and differences between the fiction of such sports as hunting and fishing and that of baseball. Graceful reflections for a select audience. (Sept.)