![]() ![]() According to Bottum, the slow eclipse of Protestantism in the West has correlated with increasing disinterest in the novel as a subject of serious cultural significance.īottum’s insights, in turn, led me to contemplate a question I’d never really considered before. Early last year, just before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down cities and countries across the globe, I read Joseph Bottum’s book The Decline of the Novel, which contrasts the “chanson fiction” of the medieval Catholic imagination-which stressed the integrity of social roles, the accomplishment of duties, and the performance of civic scripts-with the “roman fiction” of later Protestantism, which emphasized the personal journey of the individual narrator. ![]()
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