An Accidental Pope

This collection will introduce the peculiar charms of Hadrian the Seventh to a new generation of readers. It offers exciting perspectives on the intellectual, religious and historical contexts of Frederick Rolfe’s eccentric masterpiece. The book demonstrates Rolfe’s playful engagement with literary Decadence, his complex interrogation of nineteenth-century political thought, and his fraught negotiation of same-sex desire. It also illuminates the novel’s tangled relationship with Rolfe’s fractious personal life, uncovering for the first time the identity of the targets of his notoriously biting satire. -- Fraser Riddell * Associate Professor in English, Durham University, UK *
Frederick Rolfe’s Hadrian the Seventh is a landmark work in the history of the novel. Deeply idiosyncratic, it holds an important place in the transition from decadence to modernism and in the Catholic literary tradition. Despite that importance, strong scholarship on the novel is surprisingly sparse. This excellent collection is therefore a landmark, its impressive roster of contributors placing the novel in its many contexts, including biographical, formal/literary historical, theological and church historical, political, and sketching out its reception history. In addition an appendix offers an invaluable ‘key’ to the novel identifying the historical personages depicted or referred to. It will be a volume of great interest to readers of Rolfe, and of the twentieth-century novel more generally. -- Alex Murray, Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Frederick Rolfe is known for his recondite erudition and reactionary remembrance of things past. An Accidental Pope reveals him anew as a kind of literary caricaturist who, as an outsider and convert, perceived and amplified the perverse aspects of contemporary Catholic culture. His life and works are, thereby, shown to stand at a significant intersection between the histories of modernism in literature, queer community and religious faith. -- Dominic Janes, Keele University, UK