The Disappearance of God
Five Nineteenth-Century Writers
In this acclaimed study, J. Hillis Miller focuses on five Victorian authors--Matthew Arnold, Charlotte Brontė, Robert Browning, Thomas DeQuincey, and Gerard Manley Hopkins--to present their various responses to crises of faith in the face of Darwinism, the rise of science, urbanization and other factors that seemed to distance them from God.
A landmark work of literary criticism by one of the foremost interpreters of nineteenth-century England, The Disappearance of God confronts the consciousness of an absent (though perhaps still existent) God in the writings of Thomas De Quincey, Robert Browning, Emily Brontė, Matthew Arnold, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. J. Hillis Miller surveys the intellectual and material developments that conspired to cut man off from God--among other factors the city, developments within Christianity, subjectivism, and the emergence of the modern historical sense--and shows how each writer's body of work reflects a sustained response to the experience of God's disappearance.
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