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Marilyn Faulkenburg's 'Church, City, and Labyrinth' is a learned, original, and penetrating discussion of work by three nineteenth- and twentieth-century novelists. Taking her beginning from the long historical connection joining church, city and labyrinth in their circular designs and in their frequent superimposition, Dr. Faulkenburg explores the ways in which the structuring of the city as a labyrinth with a church at the center has gradually given way in modern times to cities that are labyrinths without a center and without the promise inscribed in the way all cities were once thought to be modeled on the heavenly Jerusalem. This book is of great value both for its new organizing conception and for its new readings of major works. (J. Hillis Miller, University of California. Irvine) In a cleanly precise prose, free of jargon, Marilyn Thomas Faulkenburg studies relationship of circle and center, origins and margins (as many critical vocabularies now have it). Her material consists of great Victorian fiction by Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy and one decidedly modernist novel, Michel Butor's 'L'emploi du temps'. She discovers that the cities represented there are inescapable disorders without a center, barely sustaining labyrinthine lives that hold no hope for a discovery of meaningful center, whether it be in a church, a graveyard, or a civilized tradition. All this is done refreshingly without the currently modish reliance on linguists or modes of cultural critiques. (Kent Bales, University of Minnesota)

Author Information

The Author: Marilyn Thomas Faulkenburg received her doctoral degree from the University of Minnesota. She is currently a Professor of Managerial Communication at Menlo College in Atherton, California. Her literary criticism has appeared in numerous journals. An essay on Kierkegaard appears in the 1992 edition of Nineteenth Century Literature Criticism, edited by Gale Research Inc.

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