Heaven, Hell, and the Victorians

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Cambridge University Press, Oct 13, 1994 - History - 279 pages
The Victorians were obsessed with death, bereavement, and funeral rituals, and speculated vigorously on the nature of heaven, hell, and divine judgment. This popular abridgement of Michael Wheeler's award-winning Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology looks at the literary implications of Victorian views of death and the life beyond, and recreates vividly the fear and hope embodied in the theological positions of the novelists and poets of the age. Now accessible to a wide readership, Heaven, Hell, and the Victorians offers a wide-ranging and attractively illustrated cultural history of nineteenth-century religious experience, belief, and language in the face of death.
 

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Contents

Introduction
1
A Lively Hope
6
The question of biblical authority
13
Analogy and the limits of language
17
a test case
22
Death
28
consolation and communication
31
The grave and the analogy of nature
50
Heaven
119
Heaven paradise and the kingdom
122
heaven in the present tense
136
Heaven in poetry of sacred and profane love
147
Hell
175
The fear of hell
179
The theology of hell
187
some versions of hell on earth
196

Judgment
68
Judgment the intermediate state and the millennium
73
Poetic forms and apocalyptic visions
83
Fiction and the sense of an ending
109
Conclusion
219
Notes
230
Index
267
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