Victorian Conversion Narratives and Reading Communities

Victorian Conversion Narratives and Reading Communities
Author: Emily Walker Heady
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2016-03-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317002237

Because Victorian authors rarely discuss conversion experiences separately from the modes in which they are narrated, Emily Walker Heady argues that the conversion narrative became, in effect, a form of literary criticism. Literary conventions, in turn, served the reciprocal function as a means of discussing the nature of what Heady calls the 'heart-change.' Heady reads canonical authors such as John Henry Newman, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde through a dual lens of literary history and post-liberal theology. As Heady shows, these authors question the ability of realism to contain the emotionally freighted and often jarring plot lines that characterize conversion. In so doing, they explore the limits of narrative form while also shedding light on the ways in which conversion narratives address and often disrupt the reading communities in which they occur.

Europa Sun Issue 5

Europa Sun Issue 5
Author:
Publisher: Carolyn Emerick
Total Pages: 77
Release:
Genre:
ISBN:

Europa Sun's fifth issue is here! Every issue seems to have its own feel and slight theme, and this issue is no different. This issue is slightly more literary than usual, with articles on William Butler Yeats (Irish patriotic poet), Homer's Iliad, Victorian writing conventions, and the work of the Brothers Grimm. Additionally, this turned out to be quite the German issue! In addition to the Grimm Brothers, articles discuss the famous ancient Germanic tribal hero Arminius and his famous Battle of Teutoburg Forest, and the medieval German mystic, Hildegard of Bingen. In addition to the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, fans of military history will enjoy reading about the 100 Years' War and a wonderful discussion about the history of the firearm in the West. An image spread exploring the Georgian Cross as a chivalric symbol used by nobility in dueling rounds out this issue with a bit of a military history theme as well. As always, there is a variety of topics from Western cultural heritage explored, and includes a lovely poetry spread featuring many of our previous writers. The issue is richly illustrated in beautiful full color throughout.

Forgiveness in Victorian Literature

Forgiveness in Victorian Literature
Author: Richard Hughes Gibson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2015-01-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 147422220X

Forgiveness was a preoccupation of writers in the Victorian period, bridging literatures highbrow and low, sacred and secular. Yet if forgiveness represented a common value and language, literary scholarship has often ignored the diverse meanings and practices behind this apparently uncomplicated value in the Victorian period. Forgiveness in Victorian Literature examines how eminent writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde wrestled with the religious and social meanings of forgiveness in an age of theological controversy and increasing pluralism in ethical matters. Richard Gibson discovers unorthodox uses of the language of forgiveness and delicate negotiations between rival ethical and religious frameworks, which complicated forgiveness's traditional powers to create or restore community and, within narratives, offered resolution and closure. Illuminated by contemporary philosophical and theological investigations of forgiveness, this study also suggests that Victorian literature offers new perspectives on the ongoing debate about the possibility and potency of forgiving.

The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-century Christian Thought

The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-century Christian Thought
Author: Joel D. S. Rasmussen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 737
Release: 2017
Genre: History
ISBN: 0198718403

This Handbook considers Christian thought in the long nineteenth century (from the French Revolution to the First World War), encompassing not only doctrine and theology, but also Christianity's mutual influence on literature and the arts, political and economic thought, and the natural and social sciences.

George Eliot

George Eliot
Author: Ilana M. Blumberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2024-02-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0192659707

The girl who would become George Eliot began her professional writing life with a poem bidding farewell to all books but the Bible. How did a young Christian poet become the great realist novelist whose commitment to religious freethinking made her so iconoclastic that she could not be buried in in Westminster Abbey? Memorialized there today by a stone lain in the Poets' Corner in 1980, George Eliot wrote herself and her fellow Victorians through turbulent decades of moral and historical doubt in religious orthodoxy, alongside the unrelenting need to articulate a compelling modern faith in its place. Unafraid to confront the most difficult existential questions of her time, George Eliot wrote immensely popular novels that wrestled with problems whose hold has barely lessened in the last 150 years: the pervasiveness of human suffering and the injustice of its measures; the tension between fulfilling our ethical obligations to others and pursuing our own well-being; the impetus to act virtuously in this world without any guarantee of reward, and the need to make some "religion" in life, something beyond our own immediate, fluctuating desires. In this new account of George Eliot's spiritual life, George Eliot: Whole Soul, Ilana Blumberg reveals to us a writer who did not simply lose her faith once and for all on her way to becoming an adult, but devoted the full span of her career to imagining a wide religious sensibility that could inform personal and social life. As we range among Eliot's letters, essays, translations, poetry, and novels, we encounter here a writer whose extraordinary art and intellect offer us company, still today, in the search for modern meaning.

Handbook of the English Novel, 1830–1900

Handbook of the English Novel, 1830–1900
Author: Martin Middeke
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 686
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3110376717

Part I of this authoritative handbook offers systematic essays, which deal with major historical, social, philosophical, political, cultural and aesthetic contexts of the English novel between 1830 and 1900. The essays offer a wide scope of aspects such as the Industrial Revolution, religion and secularisation, science, technology, medicine, evolution or the increasing mediatisation of the lifeworld. Part II, then, leads through the work of more than 25 eminent Victorian novelists. Each of these chapters provides both historical and biographical contextualisation, overview, close reading and analysis. They also encourage further research as they look upon the work of the respective authors at issue from the perspectives of cultural and literary theory.

Jesus in the Victorian Novel

Jesus in the Victorian Novel
Author: Jessica Ann Hughes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2022-01-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1350278165

This book tells the story of how nineteenth-century writers turned to the realist novel in order to reimagine Jesus during a century where traditional religious faith appeared increasingly untenable. Re-workings of the canonical Gospels and other projects to demythologize the story of Jesus are frequently treated as projects aiming to secularize and even discredit traditional Christian faith. The novels of Charles Kingsley, George Eliot, Eliza Lynn Linton, and Mary Augusta Ward, however, demonstrate that the work of bringing the Christian tradition of prophet, priest, and king into conversation with a rapidly changing world can at times be a form of authentic faith-even a faith that remains rooted in the Bible and historic Christianity, while simultaneously creating a space that allows traditional understandings of Jesus' identity to evolve.

Nineteenth-Century Religion, Literature and Society

Nineteenth-Century Religion, Literature and Society
Author: Naomi Hetherington
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 1478
Release: 2021-11-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351272357

This four-volume historical resource provides new opportunities for investigating the relationship between religion, literature and society in Britain and its imperial territories by making accessible a diverse selection of harder-to-find primary sources. These include religious fiction, poetry, essays, memoirs, sermons, travel writing, religious ephemera, unpublished notebooks and pamphlet literature. Spanning the long nineteenth century (c.1789–1914), the resource departs from older models of ‘the Victorian crisis of faith’ in order to open up new ways of conceptualising religion. A key concern of the resource is to integrate non-Christian religions into our understanding and representations of religious life in this period. Each volume is framed around a different meaning of the term ‘religion’. Volume one on ‘Traditions’ offers an overview of the different religious traditions and denominations present in Britain in this period. Volume two on ‘Mission and Reform’ considers the social and political importance of religious faith and practice as expressed through foreign and domestic mission and philanthropic and political movements at home and abroad. Volume three turns to ‘Religious Feeling’ as an important and distinct category for understanding the ways in which religion is embodied and expressed in culture. Volume four on ‘Disbelief and New Beliefs’ explores the transformation of the religious landscape of Britain and its imperial territories during the nineteenth century as a result of key cultural and intellectual forces. The resource is aimed primarily at researchers and students working within the fields of literature and social and religious history. It supplies an interpretative context for sources in the form of explanatory headnotes to each source or group of sources and volume introductions that explore overarching themes. Each volume can be read independently, but they work together to elucidate the complex and multi-faceted nature of nineteenth-century religious life.

The Jew's Daughter

The Jew's Daughter
Author: Efraim Sicher
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2017-05-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1498527795

A new approach to thinking about the representation of the Other in Western society, The Jew’s Daughter: A Cultural History of a Conversion Narrative offers an insight into the gendered difference of the Jew. Focusing on a popular narrative of “The Jew’s Daughter,” which has been overlooked in conventional studies of European anti-Semitism, this innovative study looks at canonical and neglected texts which have constructed racialized and sexualized images that persist today in the media and popular culture. The book goes back before Shylock and Jessica in TheMerchant of Venice and Isaac and Rebecca in Ivanhoe to seek the answers to why the Jewish father is always wicked and ugly, while his daughter is invariably desirable and open to conversion. The story unfolds in fascinating transformations, reflecting changing ideological and social discourses about gender, sexuality, religion, and nation that expose shifting perceptions of inclusion and exclusion of the Other. Unlike previous studies of the theme of the Jewess in separate literatures, Sicher provides a comparative perspective on the transnational circulation of texts in the historical context of the perception of both Jews and women as marginal or outcasts in society. The book draws on examples from the arts, history, literature, folklore, and theology to draw a complex picture of the dynamics of Jewish-Christian relations in England, France, Germany, and Eastern Europe from 1100 to 2017. In addition, the responses of Jewish authors illustrate a dialogue that has not always led to mutual understanding. This ground-breaking work will provoke questions about the history and present state of prejudiced attitudes in our society.

The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century

The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century
Author: Elizabeth Ludlow
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2020-07-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030400824

This book is an interdisciplinary collection of essays that explores the variety of ways in which the interface between understanding the figure of Christ, the place of the cross, and the contours of lived experience, was articulated through the long nineteenth century. Collectively, the chapters respond to the theological turn in postmodern thought by asking vital questions about the way in which representations of Christ shape understandings of personhood and of the divine.