"This book explores the 'dark, pessimistic truth that pervades the pages of modern texts', setting a theme of Dante's Inferno against the work of modern authors including Dostoyevksy, Hardy, Conrad, Wharton, Kafka, Camus, Nathanael West, Waugh, and Flannery O'Connor. The author's thesis is that these writers exhibit a hostility towards the reader, an anger that the reader should continue to be so deludedly happy when the writer has become so mortifyingly enlightened."--Jacket.