In an interview, Joseph C. Hough Jr., president of Union Theological Seminary in New York, warned that the novels' preoccupation with the suffering that many evangelical Christians foresee for unbelievers "leads people to think that Christianity is about cosmic fire insurance".
Much as this might signal the novel's preoccupation with masculine sensibilities, it is not as clumsy as it sounds.
This book connects the Victorian novel's preoccupation with the landed estate to nineteenth-century debates about property, specifically as it played out in the English occupation of Ireland.
The latter set of readings, however, does not adequately account for the novel's preoccupation with the time of revolution and thereby dissipates the political force generated in Melville's development of a relation between democracy and the possibility of its historical transformation.
Given the novel's preoccupation with media glare, Whitehead is keenly aware that the half-life of the Next New Thing is dizzyingly short.
One scholar has suggested that Stoker chose Whitby as the site of Dracula's first appearance in England because of the Synod of Whitby, given the novel's preoccupation with timekeeping and calendar disputes.
Another of the novel's preoccupations is surveillance and spying.
Camouflage and cover are the novel's preoccupations; enigma, disguise and indirection its styles of telling.
"Consolation" reads like a novel whose preoccupations have been nurtured and earned.
Perisic depicts, with… "The modern novel has preoccupations with displacement, estrangement, the marginalized and excluded," Hisham Matar said last night.
Related: Baileys women's prize for fiction longlist - in pictures Another of the novel's preoccupations is surveillance and spying.
