Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible

Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible PDF Author: Charles LaPorte
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813931657
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible charts the impact of post-Enlightenment biblical criticism on English literary culture. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a widespread reevaluation of biblical inspiration, in which the Bible’s poetic nature came to be seen as an integral part of its religious significance. Understandably, then, many poets who followed this interpretative revolution—including Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning—came to reconceive their highest vocational ambitions: if the Bible is essentially poetry, then modern poetry might perform a cultural role akin to that of scripture. This context equally illuminates the aims and achievements of famous Victorian unbelievers such as Arthur Hugh Clough and George Eliot, who also responded enthusiastically to the poetic ideal of an inspired text. Building upon a recent and ongoing reevaluation of religion as a vital aspect of Victorian culture, Charles LaPorte shows the enduring relevance of religion in a period usually associated with its decline. In doing so, he helps to delineate the midcentury shape of a literary dynamic that is generally better understood in Romantic poetry of the earlier part of the century. The poets he examines all wrestled with modern findings about the Bible's fortuitous historical composition, yet they owed much of their extraordinary literary success to their ability to capitalize upon the progress of avant-garde biblical interpretation. This book's revisionary and provocative thesis speaks not only to the course of English poetics but also to the logic of nineteenth-century literary hierarchies and to the continuing evolution of religion in the modern era. Victorian Literature and Culture Series

Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible

Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible PDF Author: Charles LaPorte
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813931657
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Get Book Here

Book Description
Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible charts the impact of post-Enlightenment biblical criticism on English literary culture. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a widespread reevaluation of biblical inspiration, in which the Bible’s poetic nature came to be seen as an integral part of its religious significance. Understandably, then, many poets who followed this interpretative revolution—including Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning—came to reconceive their highest vocational ambitions: if the Bible is essentially poetry, then modern poetry might perform a cultural role akin to that of scripture. This context equally illuminates the aims and achievements of famous Victorian unbelievers such as Arthur Hugh Clough and George Eliot, who also responded enthusiastically to the poetic ideal of an inspired text. Building upon a recent and ongoing reevaluation of religion as a vital aspect of Victorian culture, Charles LaPorte shows the enduring relevance of religion in a period usually associated with its decline. In doing so, he helps to delineate the midcentury shape of a literary dynamic that is generally better understood in Romantic poetry of the earlier part of the century. The poets he examines all wrestled with modern findings about the Bible's fortuitous historical composition, yet they owed much of their extraordinary literary success to their ability to capitalize upon the progress of avant-garde biblical interpretation. This book's revisionary and provocative thesis speaks not only to the course of English poetics but also to the logic of nineteenth-century literary hierarchies and to the continuing evolution of religion in the modern era. Victorian Literature and Culture Series

A People of One Book

A People of One Book PDF Author: Timothy Larsen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199570094
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
This book vividly recovers the lost world of the Victorians in which everyone thought, spoke, and argued through scripture. Larsen presents lively individual case studies of well known figures from different religious and sceptical traditions, including Florence Nightingale, T. H. Huxley, C. H. Spurgeon and Catherine Booth.

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture PDF Author: Juliet John
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191082090
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 769

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture is a major contribution to the dynamic field of Victorian studies. This collection of 37 original chapters by leading international Victorian scholars offers new approaches to familiar themes including science, religion, and gender, and gives space to newer and emerging topics including old age, fair play, and economics. Structured around three broad sections (Ways of Being: Identity and Ideology, Ways of Understanding: Knowledge and Belief, and Ways of Communicating: Print and Other Cultures), the volume is sub-divided into nine sub-sections each with its own 'lead' essay: on subjectivity, politics, gender and sexuality, place and race, religion, science, material and mass culture, aesthetics and visual culture, and theatrical culture. The collection, like today's Victorian studies, is thoroughly interdisciplinary and yet its substantial Introduction explores a concern which is evident both implicitly and explicitly in the volume's essays: that is, the nature and status of 'literary' culture and the literary from the Victorian period to the present. The diverse and wide-ranging essays present original scholarship framed accessibly for a mixed readership of advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and established scholars.

The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare

The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare PDF Author: Charles LaPorte
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108853463
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
In the Victorian era, William Shakespeare's work was often celebrated as a sacred text: a sort of secular English Bible. Even today, Shakespeare remains a uniquely important literary figure. Yet Victorian criticism took on religious dimensions that now seem outlandish in retrospect. Ministers wrote sermons based upon Shakespearean texts and delivered them from pulpits in Christian churches. Some scholars crafted devotional volumes to compare his texts directly with the Bible's. Still others created Shakespearean societies in the faith that his inspiration was not like that of other playwrights. Charles LaPorte uses such examples from the Victorian cult of Shakespeare to illustrate the complex relationship between religion, literature and secularization. His work helps to illuminate a curious but crucial chapter in the history of modern literary studies in the West, as well as its connections with Biblical scholarship and textual criticism.

Algernon Swinburne and Walter Pater

Algernon Swinburne and Walter Pater PDF Author: Sarah Glendon Lyons
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351577069
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
How did literary aestheticism emerge in Victorian Britain, with its competing models of religious doubt and visions of secularisation? For Lyons, the aestheticism developed and progressively revised by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) and Walter Pater (1839-1894) illuminates the contradictory impulses of modern secularism: on the one hand, a desire to cast itself as a form of neutrality or disinterestedness; on the other, a desire to affirm 'this world' as the place of human flourishing or even enchantment. The standard narrative of a 'crisis of faith' does not do justice to the fissured, uncertain quality of Victorian visions of secularisation. Precisely because it had the status of a confusing hypothesis rather than a self-evident reality, it provoked not only dread and melancholia, but also forms of fantasy. Within this context Lyons gives a fundamentally new account of the aims and nature of Victorian aestheticism, taking as a focus its deceptively simple claim that art is for art's sake first of all.

Victorian Faith in Crisis

Victorian Faith in Crisis PDF Author: Richard J. Helmstadter
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804716024
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 422

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Book Description
A Stanford University Press classic.

Cultivating Belief

Cultivating Belief PDF Author: Sebastian Lecourt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192540599
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
This book explores how a group of Victorian liberal writers that included George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Matthew Arnold became attracted to new theories of religion as a function of race and ethnicity. Since the early modern period, British liberals had typically constructed religion as a zone of personal belief that defined modern individuality and interiority. During the 1860s, however, Eliot, Arnold, and other literary liberals began to claim that religion could actually do the most for the modern self when it came as a kind of involuntary inheritance. Stimulated by the emerging science of anthropology, they imagined that religious experiences embedded in race or ethnicity could render the self heterogeneous, while the individual who insisted upon selecting his or her own beliefs would become narrow and parochial. By rethinking the grounds of religion, this book argues, these writers were ultimately trying to shift liberal individualism away from a classical Protestant liberalism that celebrated interiority and agency and toward one that valorized eclecticism and the capacity to keep multiple values in play. More broadly, their work offers us a new picture of secularization, not as a process of religious decline, but as the reinscription of religion as an ordinary feature of human life—like art, or politics, or sex—whose function could be debated.

Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book

Shakespeare, the Bible, and the Form of the Book PDF Author: Travis DeCook
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136662766
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Why do Shakespeare and the English Bible seem to have an inherent relationship with each other? How have these two monumental traditions in the history of the book functioned as mutually reinforcing sources of cultural authority? How do material books and related reading practices serve as specific sites of intersection between these two textual traditions? This collection makes a significant intervention in our understanding of Shakespeare, the Bible, and the role of textual materiality in the construction of cultural authority. Departing from conventional source study, it questions the often naturalized links between the Shakespearean and biblical corpora, examining instead the historically contingent ways these links have been forged. The volume brings together leading scholars in Shakespeare, book history, and the Bible as literature, whose essays converge on the question of Scripture as source versus Scripture as process—whether that scripture is biblical or Shakespearean—and in turn explore themes such as cultural authority, pedagogy, secularism, textual scholarship, and the materiality of texts. Covering an historical span from Shakespeare’s post-Reformation era to present-day Northern Ireland, the volume uncovers how Shakespeare and the Bible’s intertwined histories illuminate the enduring tensions between materiality and transcendence in the history of the book.

Pirating Fictions

Pirating Fictions PDF Author: Monica F. Cohen
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813940702
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
Two distinctly different meanings of piracy are ingeniously intertwined in Monica Cohen's lively new book, which shows how popular depictions of the pirate held sway on the page and the stage even as their creators were preoccupied with the ravages of literary appropriation. The golden age of piracy captured the nineteenth-century imagination, animating such best-selling novels as Treasure Island and inspiring theatrical hits from The Pirates of Penzance to Peter Pan. But the prevalence of unauthorized reprinting and dramatic adaptation meant that authors lost immense profits from the most lucrative markets. Infuriated, novelists and playwrights denounced such literary piracy in essays, speeches, and testimonies. Their fiction, however, tells a different story. Using landmarks in copyright history as a backdrop, Pirating Fictions argues that popular nineteenth-century pirate fiction mischievously resists the creation of intellectual property in copyright legislation and law. Drawing on classic pirate stories by such writers as Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Louis Stevenson, and J. M. Barrie, this wide-ranging account demonstrates, in raucous tales and telling asides, how literary appropriation was celebrated at the very moment when the forces of possessive individualism began to enshrine the language of personal ownership in Anglo-American views of creative work.

The New Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation

The New Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation PDF Author: Ian Boxall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108490921
Category : Bibles
Languages : en
Pages : 411

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Book Description
This volume provides an up-to-date introduction to the diverse ways the Bible is being interpreted by scholars in the field.