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Author: William R. McKelvy
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813925714
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
What constitutes reading? This is the question William McKelvy asks in The English Cult of Literature. Is it a theory of interpretation or a physical activity, a process determined by hermeneutic destiny or by paper, ink, hands, and eyes? McKelvy seeks to transform the nineteenth-century field of "Religion and Literature" into "Reading and Religion," emphasizing both the material and the institutional contexts for each. In doing so, he hopes to recover the ways in which modern literary authority developed in dialogue with a politically reconfigured religious authority.The received wisdom has been that England's literary tradition was modernity's most promising religion because the established forms of Christianity, wounded in the Enlightenment, inevitably gave up their hold on the imagination and on the political sphere. Through a series of case studies and analysis of a diverse range of writing, this work gives life to a very different story, one that shows literature assuming a religious vocation in concert with an increasingly unencumbered freedom of religious confession and the making of a reading nation. In the process the author shifts attention away from the idea of the literary critic in favor of considering the historic role of religious professionals in shaping and contesting the authority of print.Indebted to recent findings of book history and newer historiographies at odds with conventional secularization theory, this work makes an interdisciplinary contribution to revising the existing models for understanding change in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Author: William R. McKelvy
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813925714
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
What constitutes reading? This is the question William McKelvy asks in The English Cult of Literature. Is it a theory of interpretation or a physical activity, a process determined by hermeneutic destiny or by paper, ink, hands, and eyes? McKelvy seeks to transform the nineteenth-century field of "Religion and Literature" into "Reading and Religion," emphasizing both the material and the institutional contexts for each. In doing so, he hopes to recover the ways in which modern literary authority developed in dialogue with a politically reconfigured religious authority.The received wisdom has been that England's literary tradition was modernity's most promising religion because the established forms of Christianity, wounded in the Enlightenment, inevitably gave up their hold on the imagination and on the political sphere. Through a series of case studies and analysis of a diverse range of writing, this work gives life to a very different story, one that shows literature assuming a religious vocation in concert with an increasingly unencumbered freedom of religious confession and the making of a reading nation. In the process the author shifts attention away from the idea of the literary critic in favor of considering the historic role of religious professionals in shaping and contesting the authority of print.Indebted to recent findings of book history and newer historiographies at odds with conventional secularization theory, this work makes an interdisciplinary contribution to revising the existing models for understanding change in Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Author: Gregory Maertz
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 3838269810
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299
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Book Description
The construction of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as an Anglo-American sage and literary icon was the product of a cult of personality that lay at the center of nineteenth-century cultural politics. A reconstruction of the culture wars fought over Goethe’s authority, a previously hidden chapter in the intellectual history of the period ranging from the late eighteenth century to the threshold of Modernism, is the focus of Literature and the Cult of Personality. Marginal as well as canonical writers and critics figured prominently in this process, and Literature and the Cult of Personality offers insight into the mediation activities of Mary Wollstonecraft, Henry Crabb Robinson, the canonical Romantic poets, Thomas Carlyle, Margaret Fuller, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, and others. For women writers and Jacobins, Scots, and Americans, translating Goethe served as an empowering cultural platform that challenges the myth of the self-sufficiency of British literature. Reviewing and translating German authors provided a means of gaining literary enfranchisement and offered a paradigm of literary development according to which 're-writers' become original writers through an apprenticeship of translation and reviewing. In the diverse and fascinating body of critical writing examined in this book, textual exegesis plays an unexpectedly minor role; in its place, a full-blown cult of personality emerges along with a blueprint for the ideology of hero-worship that is more fully mapped out in the cultural and political life of twentieth-century Europe.
Author: Gina McKinnon
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781402774850
Category : Best books
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
500 essential cult books brings together some of the best cult books ever written, assembling an incredible list comprising fiction, memoirs, thrillers, sci-fi and fantasy epics, self-help tomes, graphic novels and children's books from across the ages.
Author: David Womersley
Publisher: University of Delaware Press
ISBN: 9780874138962
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
In the preface to his edition of Shakespeare, Alexander Pope noted that his age was one of Parties, both in Wit and State. Much scholarship has been devoted to the complexities of the political parties of the eighteenth century, but there has been a surprising reluctance to explore what Pope implied were the corollaries of those parties, namely, parties in literature. The essays collected here explore the literary culture that arose from and supported what Pitt the Elder referred to as the great spirit of Whiggism that animated English politics during the eighteenth century. From the prehistory of Whiggism in the court of Charles II to the fractures opened up within it by the French Revolution in the 1790s, the interactions between Whiggish politics and literature are sampled and described in groundbreaking essays that range widely across the fields of eighteenth-century political prose, poetry, and the novel.
Author: Gina M. Dorré
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351875892
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
The horse was essential to the workings of Victorian society, and its representations, which are vast, ranging, and often contradictory, comprise a vibrant cult of the horse. Examining the representational, emblematic, and rhetorical uses of horses in a diversity of nineteenth-century texts, Gina M. Dorré shows how discourses about horses reveal and negotiate anxieties related to industrialism and technology, constructions of gender and sexuality, ruptures in the social fabric caused by class conflict and mobility, and changes occasioned by national "progress" and imperial expansion. She argues that as a cultural object, the horse functions as a repository of desire and despair in a society rocked by astonishing social, economic, and technological shifts. While representations of horses abound in Victorian fiction, Gina M. Dorré's study focuses on those novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Braddon, Anna Sewell, and George Moore that engage with the most impassioned controversies concerning horses and horse-care, such as the introduction of the steam engine, popular new methods of horse-taming, debates over the tight-reining of horses, and the moral furor surrounding gambling at the race track. Her book establishes the centrality of the horse as a Victorian cultural icon and explores how through it, dominant ideologies of gender and class are created, promoted, and disrupted.
Author: Virginia Blanton
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271047984
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
Author: Theodore Ziolkowski
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421422433
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 245
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Book Description
After much investigation, Ziolkowski reinforces Umberto Eco's notion that the most powerful secret, the magnetic center of conspiracy fiction, is in fact "a secret without content."
Author: Roger Canals
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1785336134
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212
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Book Description
The current practice of the cult of María Lionza is one of the most important and yet unexplored religious practices in Venezuela. Based on long-term fieldwork, this book explores the role of images and visual culture within the cult. By adopting a relational approach, A Goddess in Motion shows how the innumerable images of this goddess—represented as an Indian, white or mestizo woman—move constantly from objects to bodies, from bodies to dreams, and from the religion domain to the art world. In short, this book is a fascinating study that sheds light on the role of visual creativity in contemporary religious manifestations.
Author: Thomas R. Whissen
Publisher: Greenwood
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
Essays on 50 books that have acquired a permanent underground following in the past two centuries, analyze each story, its place in its world, and the manifestations of its cultism. Animal farm, Dune, Lord of the rings, and Walden two, are among the books. Also includes an introductory survey of the cult phenomenon, general and specific bibliographies, and a chronological list, 1774-1979, that also notes books not discussed. Classic Cult Fiction is a history, analysis, and reference guide to books that have become "bibles" to generations of Europeans and Americans over the past 200 years--books like The Catcher in the Rye. Fearlessly taking on "canon formation," Whissen identifies the top 50 classic cult books, first presenting an informed and witty interpretation of the phenomenon and its characteristics with examples from different cultures and periods. The individual works are each discussed relative to time and place, impact, and audience psychology and analyzed in terms of common cult attributes. A chronological listing of cult fiction adds a number of titles not chosen for the top 50.
Author: Max Ehrlich
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780553123999
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
John Morse kidnaps young followers from The Souls for Jesus cult.
