Table of Contents

Preface

I. The Judeo-Christian Heritage
Chapter One: The Divine Face and the Face to Face in The Bible
Inter-Chapter: St. Augustine’s Incarnate Face of Christ
Chapter Two: Christ-Like and Compassionate Faces in Shakespeare’s Richard II, King Lear, The Tempest, and Julius Caesar
Inter-Chapter: The Modern Face in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native
Chapter Three: Christ’s Face and its Adversaries in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot

II. The Pagan Heritage
Chapter Four: Divine Faces and the Face to Face in Apuleius’s
Metamorphoses: The Tale of Psyche and Cupid
Chapter Five: Syncretic Faces in Hermann Hesse’s Demian
Chapter Six: Pagan and Christian Faces in C. S. Lewis’s Till We
Have Faces

Coda: Emmanuel Levinas’s Ethics of the Face
Works Cited

Promotional Information

A comparative study that explores the influence of Christian and Classical ideas about the divine face in the writing of four major writers in Western literature.

About the Author

Maurice Hunt is Research Professor of English at Baylor University, USA. He is the author of ten books, including Shakespeare’s Romance of the Word (1990), Shakespeare’s Labored Art: Stir, Work, and the Late Plays (1995), Shakespeare’s Religious Allusiveness (2004), and Shakespeare’s Speculative Art (2011).

Reviews

Maurice Hunt demonstrates that a great many diverse works of a religious and secular nature have represented face-to-face encounters between human beings and gods or between human beings and their fellow human beings in order to convey religious or ethical ideas. I came away from this book with a new recognition of an important motif in Western religious and cultural history. I also came away with a deeper understanding of the psychology of religious belief. It is an impressive achievement.
*James Hirsh, Professor of English, Georgia State University, USA*