ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the way for more extended explorations into the congruencies and contrasts between fictional representation and missionary proselytism. It begins shaping one account with the story of a clergyman-critic who brought the missionary imperative in Christianity and the representational quandaries of fiction very close indeed, and in fact combined them in his own person. Missionary narratives and novelistic traditions can, in conversation, create truly nuanced and textured accounts of the shifting modes of belief and unbelief that have characterized recent centuries. T. S. Eliot presents a curious alternative to the wider tendency of high literary culture to distance itself from the missionary ambitions of nineteenth-century English and American Protestantism. The Sparrow brings up an interesting conundrum in writing about Protestant missions: the fact of the much longer history of Christian missions in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions.
