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"An important contribution to studies in literature and religion, The Divine Face in Four Writers traces the influence of Christian and Classical prototypes in ideas and depictions of the divine face, and the centrality of facial expressions in characterization, in the works of William Shakespeare, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Herman Hesse, and C.S. Lewis. Maurice Hunt explores both the human yearning to see the divine face from post-Apostolic time to the 20th century, as reflected in religion, myth, and literature by writers such as Augustine, Shakespeare, Hardy and Dostoyevsky, as well as the significance of the hidden divine face in writings by Spenser, Milton, Hesse, and Lewis. A final coda briefly detailing Emmanuel Levinas's system of ethics, based on the human face and its encounters with other faces, allows Hunt to focus on specific moments in the writings of the four major writers discussed that have particular ethical value."-- "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"-- Machine generated contents note: -- 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. 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
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