Patrick White and the Religious Imagination Arthur’s Dream

". . . Offers an overview of White's oeuvre, which spans some twelve novels and almost fifty years, from Happy Valley (1939) to Memoirs of Many in One (1986). . . suggests that White gives each of his characters a particular imaginative horizon – Primitive, Jewish, Christian, Classical – and Giffin engages in close readings of the various novels, exploring the ways in which these given horizons relate, or fail to relate to each other. . . . Giffin's discursive framework provides a helpful vocabulary for engaging with White's novels. This is a provocative, often polemical, book which will no doubt be controversial, and it is a welcome contribution to an important discussion." – Jeremy Hall in Literature and Theology

"This is probably the best thing that has been written on Patrick White's work so far. . . . Giffin resists easy categories and taxonomies in order to lay stress on the mixed and heterogeneous nature of each of these various cultural horizons, capturing white's own conception of a richly interconnected world in which all strict categorisation is highly suspect. . . . " – Ron Shapiro in CrossCurrents

Table of contents:

1.To Imagine the Real

2.The Primitive Imagination – Myths of the goddess, the Superman and the irrational

3.The Revealed Imagination (I) – Judaism between Haskalah, Torah and Kabbalah

4.The Revealed Imagination (II) – Christianity between Athens, Jerusalem and Stonehenge

5.The Classical Imagination – Myths of Nature, Reason and Enlightenment

References; Bibliography; Index to Titles and Characters; Index to Concepts and Names