Literary History of Reconciliation

Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands. His previous books include Pain and Compassion in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (2012) and Devil Theatre: Demonic Possession and Exorcism in English Renaissance Drama (2007).

• List of FiguresAcknowledgements1. Introduction2. 'None Left But By Submission': Paradise Lost and the Genesis of Reconciiliation3. 'Ask Her Forgiveness?': Reconciiliation, Power and Grace in Shakespeare4. 'Pray Your Honour Forgive Me!': Hierarchical Forgiveness from Pamela to Bleak House5. 'The Apathy of the Stars': Impersonal Reconciliation in To the Lighthouse and Ulysses6. 'Not Quite Not Yet': History, Forgiveness and the Literary Imagination in Disgrace and Atonement7. 'The Prairie Still Shines like Transfiguration': Forgiveness, Theology and Politics in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead NovelsNotesBibliographyIndex

A thoughtful overview of reconciliation in modern literature … Dijkhuizen traces reconciliation’s history through novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, and Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son, thus also sketching the emergence of the modern subject. These valuable readings provide valuable insights … Modernists—Virginia Woolf, James Joyce—are read in such a way as to show not only that reconciliation is an important theme but also that their plots are as important as their style. Summing Up: Recommended.