OneSearch
Also search in the Catalog, Databases or e-Journal list.
Reclaiming Myths of Power: Women Writers and the Victorian Spiritual Crisis This work reexamines the Victorian spiritual crisis from the perspective of the period's women writers, exploring the spiritual dimension in their writings. Case studies of the lives and writings of Florence Nightingale, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot provide an in-depth analysis of the relationship between these crises and narrative strategies that reappropriate the conservative power associated with religious symbolism.
Victorian Feminism, 1850-1900 "Admirable, lucid... A splendid textbook (complete with chronologies of significant dates) that offers a competent overview of feminist protest in the Victorian era. It will be widely recommended for students of history and women's studies courses in higher education." -- Times Higher Education Supplement "An excellent, well-researched survey of the many fronts of feminist struggle for equality from 1850 to 1900... The thesis of this small useful book is that the aggressive activities of the well-known British suffragettes have obscured the significance of other areas of the feminist movement in the half-century before 1900. Philippa Levine's survey of Victorian feminism covers these neglected issues succinctly... A great asset to all courses on modern England and British feminism." -- American Historical ReviewVictorian Poetry and the Romantic Religion This book is a critical introduction to major English poetry of the nineteenth century with an analysis of the changes in subject matter, form, tone, and technique resulting from Romantic influences. A reexamination of Victorian poems, placed against a background of Romantic thought, structure, and method, includes most of the major works of Arnold and Tennyson, as well as selected poems of Browning. Professor Colville reveals particular adaptations of the Romantic heritage in the shaping of mental attitudes in these poets. He finds that Arnold used his romantic inheritance in a series of delicately balanced oppositions, or tensions, which eloquently express the agonizing stasis of his outlook; that Browning used the Romantic style crudely and badly in his subjective transcendental poetry, and could usually only be successful as a poet by turning to objective, external concerns--by taking his manifest self out of the poems. Only in Tennyson, after an early stage of intense and undigested Romantic imitation, is there a sustained and successful attempt to refine and discipline Romantic style and method to serve his own outlook and utterance. This volume should be useful to students of nineteenth century English literature through the way in which it relates the major poets of the century to each other and the Romantics. The brief introductory reformulation for those approaching romantic poetry for the first time, with the focus on selected Romantic poems, indicates that the book is based on many years of thinking and reflection, together with a natural sympathy and understanding of the topic it treats. The book combines a humane and enthusiastic restatement of familiar ideas with some new (or hitherto underemphasized) suggestions about major Victorian poetry.
Victorian Discourses on Sexuality and Religion John Maynard's original and provocative study looks at sexuality and religion as creations of language, in the literary and cultural discourses of Victorian England. After a wide-ranging introduction (drawing on myth, anthropology, comparative religion and the history of sexuality) Maynard goes on to articulate and interpret the strikingly complex and varied ways in which the earnest sceptic Arthur Hugh Clough, the Protestant Charles Kingsley, and the Catholic convert Coventry Patmore placed the relation of sexuality and religion at the centre of their work. A final chapter on Jude the Obscure demonstrates Thomas Hardy's deconstruction of the endeavour to make sense of sexuality and religion, fragmenting this inherited discourse into mere words and bodily parts, in a disintegration of the great constructive vision of his predecessors.
Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion Kirstie Blair explores Victorian poetry in relation to Victorian religion, with particular emphasis on the bitter contemporary debates over the use of forms in worship. She argues that poetry made significant contributions to these debates, not least through its formal structures. By assessingthe discourses of church architecture and liturgy in the first half of the book, Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion demonstrates that Victorian poets both reflected on and affected ecclesiastical practices. The second half of the book focuses on particular poets and poems, includingBrowning's Christmas-Eve and Tennyson's In Memoriam, to show how High Anglican debates over formal worship were dealt with by Dissenting, Broad Church and Roman Catholic poets and other writers. This book features major Victorian poets - Tennyson, the Brownings, Rossetti, Hopkins, Hardy - from different Christian denominations, but also argues that their work was influenced by a host of minor and less studied writers, particularly the Tractarian or Oxford Movement poets whose writings arestudied in detail here. Form and Faith presents a new take on Victorian poetry by showing how important now-forgotten religious controversies were to the content and form of some of the best-known poems of the period. In methodology and content, it also relates strongly to current critical interestin poetic form and formalism, while recovering a historical context in which 'form' carried a particular weight of significance.
Florida Atlantic University Libraries
777 Glades Road
Boca Raton, FL 33431
(561) 297-6911