SOURCE: “The Secular and the Sacral: Notes on A New Athens” and “Three Stories, by Hugh Hood” in Essays on Canadian Writing, Vols. 13–14, Winter-Spring, 1978–79, pp. 211–29.

In the following essay, Mathews explores the “Christian aspect” of Hood's short fiction and the novel A New Athens.

In an exchange of correspondence with John Mills published in The Fiddlehead, Hugh Hood has defined his aim as a writer of fiction:

I am trying to assimilate the mode of the novel to the mode of fully-developed Christian allegory, in ways that I don't fully understand. I want to be more “real” than the realists, yet more transcendent than the most vaporous allegorist. … Now let me put it to you that since I am both a realist and a transcendentalist allegorist that I cannot be bound by the forms of ordinary realism.¹

These remarks imply that no critical approach based on the expectation...