San Antonio College Library

Browse the inspirational fiction section of your local bookstore, and you will likely find cover after cover depicting virtuous young women cloaked in modest dresses and wearing a pensive or playful expression. They hover innocently above sun-drenched pastures or rustic country lanes, often with a horse-drawn buggy in the background -- or the occasional brawny stranger. Romance novels with Amish protagonists, such as the best-selling trailblazer The...

For the past twenty years, evangelical prophecy novels have been a powerful presence on American bestseller lists. Emerging from a growing conservative culture industry, the genre dramatizes events that many believers expect to occur at the end of the age - the rapture of the saved, the rise of the Antichrist, and the fearful tribulation faced by those who are "left behind." Seeking the forces that drove the unexpected success of the Left Behind novels,...

Although often disparaged by scholars and pastors alike, Christian romance novels play a unique and important role in the religious lives of many evangelical women. In an ethnographic study of how and why women read evangelical romance novels, Neal interviews and surveys writers and readers and explores the texts themselves. She finds a complex religious piety among ordinary people.

Publisher's description: Flannery O'Connor was only the second twentieth-century writer (after William Faulkner) to have her work collected for the Library of America, the definitive edition of American authors. Forty years after her death, O'Connor's fiction still retains its original power and pertinence. For those who know nothing of O'Connor and her work, this new study by Ralph C. Wood offers one of the finest introductions available. For those...