Adam's Curse: Reflections on Religion and Literature

Taking its title from a poem of William Butler Yeats, this collection of essays focuses on "Adam’s Curse"—the burdens and harsh conditions that, as Denis Donoghue underscores throughout, make any human achievement difficult. As he says, those "conditions include at various levels of reference the Fall of Man, categorical failure, loss, the limitations inscribed so insistently in human life that they seem to be in the nature of things, like death and weather." But hope is never ruled out, as...