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The familiar stories of the good Samaritan, the prodigal son, and Lazarus and the rich man were part of the cultural currency in the nineteenth century, and Victorian authors drew upon the figures and plots of biblical parables for a variety of authoritative, interpretive, and subversive effects. However, scholars of parables in literature have often overlooked the 19th-century novel, assuming that realism bears no relation to the subversive, iconoclastic genre of parable. In this book Susan E. Colòn shows that authors such as Charles Dickens, Margaret Oliphant, and Charlotte Yonge appreciated the power of parables to deliver an ethical charge that was as unexpected as it was disruptive to conventional moral ideas. Against the common assumption that the genres of realism and parable are polar opposites, this study explores how Victorian novels, despite their length, verisimilitude, and multi-plot complexity, can become parables in ways that imitate, interpret, and challenge their biblical sources.
Death, judgement, heaven and hell - the four last things of Christian eschatology - have long been the subject of anxious speculation and fierce controversy, and never more so in the modern era than in Victorian Britain. In this major illustrated study, Michael Wheeler, a literary critic and cultural historian of the period, looks at the literary implications of Victorian views of death and the life beyond. Wheeler's extensive analyses of each of the four last things and their part in nineteenth-century thought draw on a wide range of literary and theological writings from 1830 to 1890. He goes on to offer revisionary readings of four central literary texts, contrasting the broadly liberal theology of Tennyson's In Memoriam and Dickens's Our Mutual Friend with the Catholic authority invoked in Newman's The Dream of Gerontius and Hopkins's The Wreck of the Deutschland. These writings are shown to reopen key theoretical questions which will stimulate fresh debate about the nature of religious experience, belief and language in the nineteenth century.
This volume explores the cultural, political, and intellectual forces that helped define nineteenth-century British Christianity. Larsen challenges many of the standard assumptions about Victorian-era Christians in their attempts to embody and their theological commitments. He highlights the way in which Dissenters and other free church Evangelicals employed the full range of theological resources available to them to take stands that the wider culture was still resisting - e.g., evangelical nonconformists enfranchising women, siding with the black population of Jamaica in opposition to their own colonial governor, championing the rights of Jews, Roman Catholics, and atheists. These stances belie the stereotypes of Victorian Evangelicals currently in existence and properly shift the focus to Dissent, to plebeian culture, to social contexts, and to the cultural and political consequences of theological commitments. This study brings freshness and verve to the study of religion and the Victorians, bearing fruit in a range of significant findings and connections.
Contents: I. Religion, evolution, and the novel; 1. 1888 and a look backwards; 2. George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Samuel Butler: three types of search; II. George Eliot: the search for a religious tradition; 1. George Eliot and science; 2. George Eliot and the "higher criticism"; 3. George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, and tradition; III. Middlemarch: the balance of a progress; 1. "Heart" and "mind": two forms of progress; 2. "Modes of religion" (a); 3. Modes of religion" (b); 4. The "metaphysics" of Middlemarch; IV. Daniel Deronda: tradition as synthesis and salvation; 1. Middlemarch and the two "worlds" of Daniel Deronda; 2. Hebraism as nationality; 3. Hebraism as religious belief; V. Walter Pater: the search for a religious atmosphere; 1. Pater's "imaginary portraits"; 2. Pater's "religion of sanity"; VI. The "atmospheres" of Marius the Epicurean; 1. The pilgrimage of Marius (a); 2. The pilgrimage of Marius (b); 3. The Christian death of a pagan; VII. Samuel Butler: the search for a religious crossing; 1. The creation of a faith (1859-1872); 2. The consolidation of a faith (1873-1886); VIII. Reality and Utopia in The way of all flesh; 1. The "past selves" of Ernest Pontifex; 2. The conversion of Ernest Pontifex; 3. The creed of Ernest Pontifex; Appendixes; Index Originally published in 1965. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
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 study explores how evangelicalism played a role in the development of the Victorian novel"--
Beginning with a wide-ranging introduction that explains why a theological reading of Victorian fiction is both rewarding and timely, Perkin also addresses religion's return to prominence in the twenty-first century, confounding earlier predictions of its imminent demise. Chapters on William Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Yonge, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy are followed by a concluding discussion of Mary Ward and Walter Pater that relates Pater's Marius the Epicurean to postmodern theology and shows how it remains a religious classic for our own time.
Criticism about the neo-Victorian novel — a genre of historical fiction that re-imagines aspects of the Victorian world from present-day perspectives — has expanded rapidly in the last fifteen years but given little attention to the engagement between science and religion. Of great interest to Victorians, this subject often appears in neo-Victorian novels including those by such well-known authors as John Fowles, A. S. Byatt, Graham Swift, and Mathew Kneale. This book discusses novels in which nineteenth-century science, including geology, paleontology, and evolutionary theory, interacts with religion through accommodations, conflicts, and crises of faith. In general, these texts abandon conventional religion but retain the ethical connectedness and celebration of life associated with spirituality at its best. Registering the growth of nineteenth-century secularism and drawing on aspects of the romantic tradition and ecological thinking, they honor the natural world without imagining that it exists for humans or functions in reference to human values. In particular, they enact a form of wonderment: the capacity of the mind to make sense of, creatively adapt, and enjoy the world out of which it has evolved — in short, to endow it with meaning. Protagonists who come to experience reality in this expansive way release themselves from self-anxiety and alienation. In this book, Glendening shows how, by intermixing past and present, fact and fiction, neo-Victorian narratives, with a few instructive exceptions, manifest this pattern.
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.
Greatly to be welcomed. This meticulously researched and richly documented account provides fresh insights into theological controversy and social prejudice and should be read by all serious students of the Victorian Church.Greatly to be welcomed. Richard Sharp The Rev. Dr John Hunt (1827-1907) was not a typical clergyman in the Victorian Church of England. He was Scottish, of lowly birth, and lacking both social connections and private means. He was also a witty and fluent intellectual, whose publications stood alongside the most eminent of his peers during a period when theology was being redefined in the light of Darwin’s Origin of Species and other radical scientific advances. Hunt attracted notoriety and conflict as well as admiration and respect: he was the subject of articles in Punch and in the wider press concerning his clandestine dissection of a foetus in the crypt of a City church, while his Essay on Pantheism was proscribed by the Roman Catholic Church. He had many skirmishes with incumbents, both evangelical and catholic, and was dismissed from several of his curacies. This book analyses his career in London and St Ives (Cambs.) through the lens of his autobiographical narrative, Clergymen Made Scarce (1867). David Yeandle has examined a little-known copy of the text that includes manuscript annotations by Eliza Hunt, the wife of the author, which offer unique insight into the many anonymous and pseudonymous references in the text. A Victorian Curate: A Study of the Life and Career of the Rev. Dr John Hunt is an absorbing personal account of the corruption and turmoil in the Church of England at this time. It will appeal to anyone interested in this history, the relationship between science and religion in the nineteenth century, or the role of the curate in Victorian England.