Reading for Redemption

Davis sets out a model of narrative resolution built on a pattern he calls redemption. In its ideal form, an innocent figure is sacrificed so that something that has been lost can be saved. He argues that this archetype lies beneath our general sense of how a story should end, and he aims to define it clearly and explain how it operates.

His central claim is that works which endure or find wide audiences rely on this pattern, though they do so in distinct ways. To test the idea, he reads an unusually broad range of texts: the Iliad and the Odyssey, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Coriolanus, mass-market bestsellers such as Valley of the Dolls, The Lord of the Rings, Le Petit Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the horror novel Frankenstein, postcolonial fiction such as Things Fall Apart and The Kite Runner, and lyric poetry. The goal is to help readers interpret individual works as well as literature in general.

The book also addresses a gap in the field. Standard textbooks on literary criticism and theory typically cover Marxist, feminist, multicultural, reader-response and queer approaches, but they rarely include a Christian perspective. For that reason, the book could serve as a supplementary text in literary criticism courses that want to include one. Its terms and method, however, do not depend on Christian belief.

Readers without a religious commitment may still benefit. Even those who doubt the assumptions behind the theory should find the many concrete examples worth considering.