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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.
The subject of death is treated as an aspect of cultural history, which includes the ideas about God, sin, death, and damnation imparted to children in Puritan New England; nineteenth-century America's grim acceptance of, if not relish for, death; consolation literature in the nineteenth century; the "rural cemetery" movement; and death in Mormon and Mexican societies. Contributors: Philippe Ariès, Ann Douglas, Stanley French, Jack Goody, Patricia Fernández Kelly, Mary Ann Meyers, Lewis O. Saum, David E. Stannard.
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