Download or read book A World Abandoned by God written by Susanna Lee and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of God, in one form or another, is a fundamental part of human experience - a given, almost. And yet, for over one hundred and fifty years, we have lived in a world become increasingly secular. The goal of this book is to reconcile these facts, or rather to examine their interaction and, in so doing, to understand the idea and the experience of secularism. Concentrating on five canonical French and Russian novels of the nineteenth century (Stendahl's The Red and the Black, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Ivan Turgenev's A Nest of Gentry, Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's Bewitched, and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Demons) and using the instruments of narrative theory, this book offers a groundbreaking critical foundation for understanding both the evolution of secular culture and the new role of the individual in modern ethical, political, and spiritual contexts.