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Article: BOOK REVIEW.(Review)
- Article from:
- The Humanist
- Article date:
- March 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 American Humanist Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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God's Funeral by A. N. Wilson (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999); 402 pp.; $27.95 cloth; $16.00 paperback.
A.N. Wilson's study of the Victorian crisis of faith borrows its title from one of Thomas Hardy's later poems, in which a procession of mourners bear "a strange and mystic form" to its final resting place. The mood of the poem is quintessentially funereal: a lamentation of bereavement and a contemplation of a future much diminished by irrevocable loss. This, for Wilson, encapsulates the true consequence of nineteenth-century religious decline in Britain. Through a series of biographical sketches of leading literary figures, God's Funeral describes a ...