Women S Poetry And Religion In Victorian England

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.

This study explores Victorian poetry in relation to Victorian religion, with particular emphasis on the bitter contemporary debates over the use of forms in worship. It discusses major Victorian poets - Tennyson, the Brownings, Rossetti, Hopkins, Hardy - and also argues that their work was influenced by a host of minor and less studied writers.

Inclusive, cutting-edge essay collection by leading scholars on Victorian women poets and their diverse poetic forms and identities.

Women in the Victorian period were acknowledged to be the "religious sex," but their relationship to the doctrines, practices, and hierarchies of Christianity was both highly circumscribed, which has been well documented, and complexly creative, which has not. Gray visits the importance of the literature of Christian devotion to women's creative lives through an examination of the varied ways in which Victorian women reproduced and recreated traditional Christian texts in their own poetic texts. Investigating how women poets redeployed the discourse of Christianity to uncover the multiple voices of the scriptures, to expand identity and gender constructions, and to question traditional narratives and processes of authorization, Gray contends that women found in religious poetry unexpected, liberating possibilities. Taking into account multiple voices, from the best-known female poets of the day to some of the most obscure, this study provides a comprehensive account of Victorian women's religious poetic creativity, and argues that this body of work helped shape the development of the lyric in the Victorian period.

Since the late twentieth century, there has been a strategic campaign to recover the impact of Victorian women writers in the field of English literature. However, with the increased understanding of the importance of interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, there is a need to extend this campaign beyond literary studies in order to recognise the role of women writers across the nineteenth century, a time that was intrinsically interdisciplinary in approach to scholarly writing and public intellectual engagement.

Examining the place of nature in Victorian women's poetry, Fabienne Moine explores the work of canonical and long-neglected women poets to show the myriad connections between women and nature during the period. At the same time, she challenges essentialist discourses that assume innate affinities between women and the natural world. Rather, Moine shows, Victorian women poets mobilised these alliances to defend common interests and express their engagement with social issues. While well-known poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti are well-represented in Moine's study, she pays particular attention to lesser known writers such as Mary Howitt or Eliza Cook who were popular during their lifetimes or Edith Nesbit, whose verse has received scant critical attention so far. She also brings to the fore the poetry of many non-professional poets. Looking to their immediate cultural environments for inspiration, these women reconstructed the natural world in poems that raise questions about the validity and the scope of representations of nature, ultimately questioning or undermining social practices that mould and often fossilise cultural identities.

This collection of essays attempts to address the disparate historical and critical ways religion informs the literature and culture of nineteenth century England, showing how a representative group of major Victorians negotiated its impact. The collection attempts to present Victorian religious discourse not as monologic but as dialogic, if not protean. It seeks to make available new understandings of nineteenth-century British literature as well as to elucidate the extent to which religious discourse is vested in Victorian cultural thoughts and practice.

Women in the Victorian period were acknowledged to be the "religious sex," but their relationship to the doctrines, practices, and hierarchies of Christianity was both highly circumscribed, which has been well documented, and complexly creative, which has not. Gray visits the importance of the literature of Christian devotion to women's creative lives through an examination of the varied ways in which Victorian women reproduced and recreated traditional Christian texts in their own poetic texts. Investigating how women poets redeployed the discourse of Christianity to uncover the multiple voices of the scriptures, to expand identity and gender constructions, and to question traditional narratives and processes of authorization, Gray contends that women found in religious poetry unexpected, liberating possibilities. Taking into account multiple voices, from the best-known female poets of the day to some of the most obscure, this study provides a comprehensive account of Victorian women's religious poetic creativity, and argues that this body of work helped shape the development of the lyric in the Victorian period.