Women of Faith in Victorian Culture

Women of Faith in Victorian Culture
Author: Andrew Bradstock
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2016-02-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 134926749X

An interdisciplinary study of Victorian women of faith as portrayed in the fiction and non-fiction of the period. The book explores how novelists, biographers and other writers depicted religious women, with special reference to the influence of the ideal of the 'Angel in the House' as embodied in Coventry Patmore's poem of that name. Among those whose work is explored are George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Christina Rossetti, George Moore and Anne Bront as well as hymnwriters, missionary biographers, non-conformist obituarists and artists of the Aesthetic Movement.

Victorian Religion

Victorian Religion
Author: Julie Melnyk
Publisher: Praeger
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2008-03-30
Genre: History
ISBN:

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.

Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature

Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature
Author: Maureen Moran
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2007-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1846310709

Exotic, corrupt, and dangerous, Roman Catholicism functioned in the popular Victorian imagination as a highly sensationalized and implacably anti-English enemy. Maureen Moran’s lively study considers a wide range of key authors—including Charlotte Brontë, Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot, as well as a number of non-canonical writers—to give a detailed account of the cultural tensions between Catholics and Protestants. Moran shows that rather than representing a traditional religious schism, the demonizing of Catholics resulted from secular fears over crime, sex, and violence.

Women's Theology in Nineteenth-century Britain

Women's Theology in Nineteenth-century Britain
Author: Julie Melnyk
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 264
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780815327936

This volume traces the modern critical and performance history of this play, one of Shakespeare's most-loved and most-performed comedies. The essay focus on such modern concerns as feminism, deconstruction, textual theory, and queer theory.

Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women’s Poetry

Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women’s Poetry
Author: F. Elizabeth Gray
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2009-09-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1135237948

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.

Woman and the Demon

Woman and the Demon
Author: Nina Auerbach
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1982
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780674954076

Analyzes the Victorian conception of both demonic and divine nature of women in Victorian art and literature.

Victorian Religious Discourse

Victorian Religious Discourse
Author: J. Nixon
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2004-08-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1403980896

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.