The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers

by J. Hillis Miller

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 Brontë, 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.
 

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Research

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

J. Hillis Miller is UCI Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author, most recently, of Black Holes (which was published with J. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading by Manuel Asensi) (Stanford, 1999)

Reviews

[J. Alfred · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very interesting book that is resolutely not what you expect. You'd think, from the title, that is was a sociological book, but the subtitle is "Five Nineteenth-Century Writers," so you'd think that it was literary biography, but one of the writers is Hopkins, so you probably have no idea what to think. And all of these things are right, sort of. It ends up being a literary critical look at the theological ideas which inform and are expressed by the works of De Quincey, Browning, Emily Bronte, Matthew Arnold, and Hopkins. If you like any of these writers, you will love some of the close readings that Miller does, and if you're interested in the period as a whole, this is a really impressive way of looking at it in a non-cliched way.