The Catholic Imagination in the Postmodern Condition: Narrative as Sacrament in Andrew Greeley’s Fiction
The Catholic Imagination in the Postmodern Condition: Narrative as Sacrament in Andrew Greeley’s Fiction

Summary/Abstract: This study reexamines the fiction of Andrew M. Greeley through the lens of postmodern literary theory. While Greeley has been popularly regarded as a clerical storyteller or dismissed as a writer of popular Catholic melodrama, little sustained scholarship has positioned his work within the discourse of postmodernism. Addressing this critical gap, this study argues that Greeley’s novels, spanning clerical sagas (The Cardinal Sins 1981; Thy Brother’s Wife, 1982), science fiction (The Final Planet, 1987), and the Nuala Anne McGrail mystery series (1994-2009), exhibit defining features of postmodern literature. This study employs close textual analysis informed by key postmodern theorists: Lyotard’s incredulity toward metanarratives, Hutcheon’s poetics of parody and historiographic metafiction, and Jameson’s cultural logic of capitalism. Also, the analysis is supplemented by theological insights from Tracy, Kearney, and Greeley’s own The Catholic Imagination (2000). Comparative readings demonstrate how Greeley destabilizes clerical and ecclesial grand narratives, hybridizes popular genres, commodifies faith through mass-market fiction, and engages in intertextual and metafictional play, while simultaneously sacralizing the fragment through a distinct Catholic imagination. The findings establish Greeley as a postmodern novelist whose fiction integrates theological vision with aesthetic strategies typically associated with secular postmodernism. This reframes his literary significance: rather than marginal popular entertainment, his novels participate in the broader cultural negotiation of faith, pluralism, and irony.

• Details
• Contents