Suicide in Modern Catholic Literature

Martin Lockerd

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781666786019, 9781666786026
• eBook ISBN: 9781666786033
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Suicide plays a major role in modern literature and the philosophy that informs it. For Catholic authors, who have always understood the act within the framework of sin and redemption, it carries a special significance. In the last century, Catholic literary figures as diverse as J.R.R. Tolkien and Walker Percy, Robert Hugh Benson and Muriel Spark, J.K. Huysmans and Graham Greene, wrestled with the problem of suicide in their work and produced art that confronts the despair so common in modern existence. As suicide rates continue to increase across the developed world and entire nations embrace and expand legalized assisted suicide, this book draws readers back to Catholic literature as a resource for understanding and perhaps even resisting this trend.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Problem of Suicide
• 1. Beginning at the End: Michel Houellebecq’s Culture of Death
• 2. Antinatalist Ecology and the Decadent Novel
• 3. Robert Hugh Benson’s Suicide Dystopia
• 4. The Stolen Gift: Suicide in Middle-Earth
• 5. Graham Greene’s Pseudo-Suicides
• 6. The Misunderstood Martyrs of Muriel Spark
• 7. Walker Percy: Suicide and Christian Existentialism
• Coda
• Bibliography