Forgiveness in Victorian Literature Grammar, Narrative, and Community [Paperback]

Forgiveness was a preoccupation of writers in the Victorian period, bridging literatures highbrow and low, sacred and secular. Yet if forgiveness represented a common value and language, literary scholarship has often ignored the diverse meanings and practices behind this apparently uncomplicated value in the Victorian period.Forgiveness in Victorian Literatureexamines how eminent writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde wrestled with the religious and social meanings of forgiveness in an age of theological controversy and increasing pluralism in ethical matters.

Richard Gibson discovers unorthodox uses of the language of forgiveness and delicate negotiations between rival ethical and religious frameworks, which complicated forgiveness's traditional powers to create or restore community and, within narratives, offered resolution and closure. Illuminated by contemporary philosophical and theological investigations of forgiveness, this study also suggests that Victorian literature offers new perspectives on the ongoing debate about the possibility and potency of forgiving.

Richard Hughes Gibsonis Assistant Professor of English Literature at Wheaton College, USA.In working out that the past cannot be erased or forgotten, but that psychological healing is possible through both extraordinary and everyday acts, Gibsons incisive analysis of the plot arcs of Victorian fiction casts light on more modern quests for effective reconciliatory processes. Jane Stabler,Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

Preface
Acknowledgements

1 Introduction: Grammar, Narrative, and Community

2 Dickens and Forgiveness in 1846: Liberality and Liability

3 Forgiving in Community: Trollope's The Vicar of Bullhampton and Eliot's Adam Bede

4 Forgiving in the Nineties: Hardy's Jude the Obscure and Wilde's De Profundis

Bibliography
Index