Community, Religion, and Literature ― Essays

As the last collection of Cleanth Brooks's essays before his death, Community, Religion, and Literature represents his final, considered views on the reading of literature and the role it plays in our society. He argues that the proper and essential role of literature lies in giving us our sense of community. Yet he denounces the extent to which literature, too, is now being usurped by the critics who see writing as pure language. He believes that just as religion renders truth of another sort, so literature is an expression of the "truth about human beings." More and more in this age of science, literature has "assumed the burden of providing civilization with its values."

Community, Religion, and Literature offers students of literature the opportunity to understand what Cleanth Brooks was actually saying, rather than what others have said he was saying.

Cleanth Brooks, one of the nation's most distinguished critics, editors, and teachers, is the author of Modern Poetry and the Tradition, The Well Wrought Urn, A Shaping Joy, and Historical Evidence and the Reading of Seventeenth-Century Poetry (University of Missouri Press)