Literature And Religion In Mid Victorian England

This book places Dickens and Wilkie Collins against such important figures as John Henry Newman and George Eliot in seeking to recover their response to the religious controversies of mid-nineteenth century England. While much recent criticism has tended to overlook or dismiss their religious pronouncements, this book foregrounds the religious aspect of their writing and relocates their most important work in the context of contemporary debate. The response of both writers is seen to be complex and fraught with tension.

This book places Dickens and Wilkie Collins against such important figures as John Henry Newman and George Eliot in seeking to recover their response to the religious controversies of mid-nineteenth century England. While much recent criticism has tended to overlook or dismiss their religious pronouncements, this book foregrounds the religious aspect of their writing and relocates their most important work in the context of contemporary debate. The response of both writers is seen to be complex and fraught with tension.

Provides an expansion of the first four volumes, containing both specially written essays and a related compilation of primary sources, drawn from the writings of the day. The text explores the wider context of religion in Victorian Britain, both in relation to the development of the Empire and its consequences. The introduction sets the scene and also provides an overview of scholarship on Victorian religion in the years since the first four volumes were published in 1988.

Religion permeated almost every aspect of Victorian life and culture, from Parliamentary politics to issues of marriage and sexuality, from class relations to literature and the life of the imagination. In order to understand Victorian culture and writings, modern readers need to understand Victorian religion in its public and its private aspects. But much in Victorian religious life can be baffling for modern readers. The sheer diversity of Victorian religious experience is one source of confusion. Also, doctrinal disputes and discoveries in science or textual criticism that loomed so large for Victorian Christians are now hard for most people to appreciate. The Anglican Church, its hierarchy, and its enormous range of ecclesiastical titles open up further opportunities for confusion. Here, Melnyk offers a lively, thorough introduction to Victorian religious life, including the period between 1828 and 1901. Making sense of the diversity of religious thought and experience in Victorian Britain, she provides readers with a clear understanding of its role in the family and for the individual, the community, and society at large. This entertaining, readable introduction to Victorian religious life and controversies is ideal for anyone interested in Victorian life, literature, and culture.

Victorian women poets lived in a time when religion was a vital aspect of their identities. Cynthia Scheinberg examines Anglo-Jewish (Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy) and Christian (Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti) women poets, and argues that there are important connections between the discourses of nineteenth-century poetry, gender and religious identity. Further, Scheinberg argues that Jewish and Christian women poets had a special interest in Jewish discourse; calling on images from Judaism and the Hebrew Scriptures, their poetry created complex arguments about the relationships between Jewish and female artistic identity. She suggests that Jewish and Christian women used poetry as a site for creative and original theological interpretation, and that they entered into dialogue through their poetry about their own and each other's religious and artistic identities. This book's interdisciplinary methodology calls on poetics, religious studies, feminist literary criticism, and little read Anglo-Jewish primary sources.

A comprehensive history of religion in Victorian England, covering such topics as religion and science, religion and society, the press, literature and art, worship, new critical methods, federation and reunion, showing both the relationship between the churches and the society in which they existed and also the major movements within the churches.

Examines the ways in which religion was constructed as a category and region of experience in nineteenth-century literature and culture.