Chesterton and Evil [Hardcover]

In the engaging Chesterton and Evil, Mark Knight offers a compelling analysis of the increasingly marginalized, but undoubtedly influential Gilbert Keith Chesterton and his late 19th and early 20th century fiction.

In his Autobiography Chesterton observed: Perhaps, when I eventually emerged as a sort of theorist, and was described as an Optimist, it was because I was one of the few people in that world of diabolism who really believed in devils. Arguing that a serious analysis of the nature of evil is at the center of his fiction, Chesterton and Evil offers an exciting, new interdisciplinary reading of Chesterton's work, and provides a means of locating it among important theological and cultural concerns of his age.

Knight acutely analyzes the nature of Chesterton's long struggle with nihilism.In place of the popular cricature of Chesterton as a lightweight Pollyanna, Knight postulates a writer who constructed a multifaceted and comprehensive response to evil.Makes a valuable contribution to Chesterton scholarship by dispelling a chronic misconception about his thought.Knight's book suceeds brilliantly in explaining the apparent contradiction between an author who taught a gospel of joy and a man who was preoccupied with the problem of evil.