Scripture and Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Scripture and Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Author: James Grande
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2023-11-16
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1501376381

This volume brings together new approaches to music history to reveal the interdependence of music and religion in nineteenth-century culture. As composers and performers drew inspiration from the Bible and new historical sciences called into question the historicity of Scripture, controversies raged over the performance, publication and censorship of old and new musical forms. From oratorio to opera, from parlour song to pantomime, and from hymn to broadside, nineteenth-century Britons continually encountered elements of the biblical past in song. Both elite and popular music came to play a significant role in the formation, regulation and contestation of religious and cultural identity and were used to address questions of class, nation and race, leading to the beginnings of ethnomusicology. This richly interdisciplinary volume brings together musicologists, historians, literary and art historians and theologians to reveal points of intersection between music, religion and cultural history.

The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology

The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology
Author: Andrew Hass
Publisher: Oxford Handbooks Online
Total Pages: 909
Release: 2007-03-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0199271976

A defining volume of essays in which leading international scholars apply an interdisciplinary approach to the long and evolving relationship between English Literature and Theology.

The Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon 1689-1901

The Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon 1689-1901
Author: Keith A. Francis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 679
Release: 2012-10-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199583595

This Handbook accesses historical, theological, rhetorical, literary and linguistic studies to demonstrate the interdisciplinary strength of the field of sermon studies and to show the centrality of sermons to private and public life in this 'golden age' of the British sermon.

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.

Charles Darwin and the Church of Wordsworth

Charles Darwin and the Church of Wordsworth
Author: Robert M. Ryan
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2016
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0198757352

Charles Darwin and the Church of William Wordsworth is a study of the cultural connections between two of the nineteenth century's most influential figures, Charles Darwin and William Wordsworth. When Darwin published On the Origin of Species, his reading public's affective response to the natural world had already been profoundly influenced by William Wordsworth. Wordsworth presented nature as benign, harmonious, a source of moral inspiration and spiritual blessing, and a medium through which one might enter into communion with the Divine. Long after his death, he continued to be revered throughout the English-speaking world, not only as a great poet, but as a theologian with a broader following than any prelate and an appeal that transcended or ignored sectarian differences. For believers and skeptics alike, Wordsworth's poetry offered a readily accessible and intellectually respectable counterweight to Darwin's vision of a material universe evolving by fixed laws in which Divinity played no discernible role and where concepts like beauty and harmony were material conditions to be explained in scientific terms. Wordsworth's theology of nature became for many readers a more effective counterforce to Darwin's ideas than Biblical orthodoxy, but it also provided an enriching context for the reception of evolutionary theory, aiding theists in their effort to reach an accommodation with the new science. As the nineteenth century's two most prominent theoreticians of nature's life, Wordsworth and Darwin competed for attention among those seeking to understand humanity's relationship with the natural world, and their disciples engaged in a productive, mutually transformative dialogue in which the poet's cultural authority influenced the way Darwin was received, and Darwinian science adjusted interpretation and evaluation of the poetry. Charles Darwin and the Church of William Wordsworth explores the broad cultural relationship between Wordsworth, Darwin, and their disciples, contextualizing them within wider discussions about the relationship between religion and science in the nineteenth century.

Byron Among the English Poets

Byron Among the English Poets
Author: Clare Bucknell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 676
Release: 2021-07-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 110890534X

The most comprehensive coverage to date of Byron's place within the English poetic tradition, this landmark study boasts a cast of the most eminent individuals working in the field and will become invaluable to students and scholars of Byron, Romantic Literature and English literary history more generally.

Taming the Chaos

Taming the Chaos
Author: Emerson R. Marks
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Total Pages: 428
Release: 1998
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780814326985

Alone among artists, poets are at once blessed and burdened by the inherent semantic component and the tarnishing social employment of their linguistic medium. In an effort to define the mysterious and attractive power of poetic discourse, Emerson Marks undertakes a comparison of successive attempts to explain the phenomenon. TAMING THE CHAOS is an ambitious study of poetic language.

Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian

Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian
Author: I. Armstrong
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 419
Release: 1999-02-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1349270210

The first collection to make a comprehensive study of nineteenth-century women's poetry from late Romantic to late Victorian 'new woman' writers. Eighteen essays consider the gendered codes and genres developed by sophisticated poets. The feminine subject and marketing, a woman's tradition, lesbian desire, war, race, colonial experience, religion and science are themes of the collection, featuring, as well as the familiar Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, other poets such as 'L.E.L.', Felicia Hemans, Amy Levy and Augusta Webster.

Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion

Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion
Author: Kirstie Blair
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2012-05-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0191636495

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 assessing the 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, including Browning'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 are studied 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 interest in poetic form and formalism, while recovering a historical context in which 'form' carried a particular weight of significance.

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth
Author: Stephen Gill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 547
Release: 2020-04-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0192551280

In this second edition of William Wordsworth: A Life, Stephen Gill draws on knowledge of the poet's creative practices and his reputation and influence in his life-time and beyond. Refusing to treat the poet's later years as of little interest, this biography presents a narrative of the whole of Wordsworth's long life--1770 to 1850--tracing the development from the adventurous youth who alone of the great Romantic poets saw life in revolutionary France to the old man who became Queen Victoria's Poet Laureate. The various phases of Wordsworth's life are explored with a not uncritical sympathy; the narrative brings out the courage he and his wife and family were called upon to show as they crafted the life they wanted to lead. While the emphasis is on Wordsworth the writer, the personal relationships that nourished his creativity are fully treated, as are the historical circumstances that affected the production of his poetry. Wordsworth, it is widely believed, valued poetic spontaneity. He did, but he also took pains over every detail of the process of publication. The foundation of this second edition of the biography remains, as it was of the first, a conviction that Wordsworth's poetry, which has given pleasure and comfort to generations of readers in the past, will continue to do so in the years to come.