Brief note: not so different

I've spent a fair amount of time here noting that Catholic and Protestant novels tended to take noticeably different paths--in terms of narrative structure and expected outcomes, in particular--but it can be just as interesting to note which authors managed to achieve crossover status by writing works that could be assimilated to multiple theological traditions.  A case in point is the German Catholic children's author Christoph Schmid, whose work, as David Blamires points out, "contains little that is specifically Catholic" (105).  Schmid's Der Zitronenhändler, translated into English as Kainer; Or, the Usurer's Doom, is identifiable as a Catholic work in its English translation only because it was brought out by a Catholic publisher, R. Washbourne.  In fact, the doom in question, in which the nasty Kainer is struck by a lightning bolt and left "lying lifeless on the floor with blackened face" (50), is almost identical to the fate of the equally nasty Tom Watson in Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tract The Thunderstorm, whose body is "scorched by lightening" and turned into a "shocking spectacle" (15).  Similarly, both Kainer and Watson are then turned into edifying texts for the public, Kainer by a funeral marker that tells the "whole simple tale" (63) of his attempt to persecute a local farmer and his punishment, Watson by a funeral sermon and, again, an epitaph that warns readers not to behave like the "bold blasphemer" (16).  The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily, as Oscar Wilde once said--which is normally not, as it happens, a given in Catholic fiction, but is far more likely to be the case in its Protestant counterpart. This is not to say that Schmid could always pass comfortably with his Protestant readers; as Blamires shows in some detail in regards to The Basket of Flowers (1823), his translators usually felt the need to add more explicit "moralizing" (111), among other things (110-13).  But the basic framework of his narratives could be left intact.  It's a useful reminder to be careful about "boxing" authors according to their denominational affiliations, as if the theology necessarily predetermined narrative form...