Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Collected Prose of John Martin Finlay

The Collected Prose of John Martin Finlay

Middleton, David
Doucet, John P.
Martin, John Finlay

Hardcover

PhilosophyLiterary Criticism

ISBN10: 195131946X
ISBN13: 9781951319465
Publisher: Wiseblood Books
Published: Dec 18 2023
Pages: 466
Weight: 1.48
Height: 1.00 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English

John Martin Finlay (1941-1991) was born in Ozark, Alabama. Finlay received his Ph.D. in English from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge in 1980, the same year he converted to Roman Catholicism.

Following the line of argument in the essay Mere Literature and the Lost Traveller by Allen Tate (1899-1979)-fellow southerner, poet-critic, and convert to Roman Catholicism-Finlay searched for, detected, and then subjected to an analysis both passionate and dispassionate certain Gnostic beliefs concerning the relationship between God (as the detached and absent Deus absconditus), the human mind, and the natural world. Finlay discovered this sometimes-hidden presence of Gnosticism not only in self-consciously modern writers such as Flaubert, Valéry, Nietzsche, Freud, and Kafka but even in some of the theological writings of Cardinal John Henry Newman and in the poetry of the poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. At the same time, Finlay, as he well knew, was confronting such Gnostic demons in his own life and mind. Finlay described his analysis of the Gnostic spirit in modern writers as a journey through hell.

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