God and Self in the Confessional Novel
explores the question: what happened to the theological practice of confession when it entered the modern novel? Beginning with the premise that guilt remains a universal human concern, this book considers confession via the classic confessional texts of Augustine and Rousseau. Employing this framework, John D. Sykes, Jr. examines Goethe’s
The Sorrows of Young Werther
, Dostoevsky’s
Notes from Underground
, Percy’s
Lancelot
, and McEwan’s
Atonement
to investigate the evolution of confession and guilt in literature from the eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century.