God and Self in the Confessional Novel

God and Self in the Confessional Novel explores the question: what happened to the theological practice of confession when it entered the modern novel?  Beginning with the premise that guilt remains a universal human concern, this book considers confession via the classic confessional texts of Augustine and Rousseau. Employing this framework, John D. Sykes, Jr. examines Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther , Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground , Percy’s Lancelot , and McEwan’s Atonement to investigate the evolution of confession and guilt in literature from the eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century.