There are academic books that spur readers to think about and look at literary works from an 'ex-centric' standpoint with regards to the established theoretical framework that surrounds them. These are also the books that compel us to go back to those novels, poems, stories as slow readers, searching for clues and tunes we might have not considered previously...Thomas J. Ferraro's Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction is one of those books, and
its flamboyant and beautifully crafted cover immediately alerts readers to its unorthodox and thought-provoking content, leading them to a journey across modern US fiction as seen through the lens of Marian Catholicism
Thomas J. Ferraro is Professor of English at Duke University. He writes on literature, film, and the performing arts, and is the author of Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America (NYU, 2005), Ethnic Passages: Literary Immigrants in 20th-Century America (University of Chicago Press, 1993), the editor of Catholic Lives, Contemporary America (Duke University Press, 1997), and a contributor to The Columbia History of the American
Novel, Scribner's Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History, and The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature.