Exotic, corrupt, and dangerous, Roman Catholicism functioned in the popular Victorian imagination as a highly sensationalized and implacably anti-English enemy. Maureen Moran’s lively study considers a wide range of key authors—including Charlotte Brontë, Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot, as well as a number of non-canonical writers—to give a detailed account of the cultural tensions between Catholics and Protestants. Moran shows that rather than representing a traditional religious schism, the demonizing of Catholics resulted from secular fears over crime, sex, and violence.

Since the establishment of sensation fiction in the 1860s, key trends have emerged in critical readings of these texts. From Victorian responses emphasising the 'lowbrow' or potentially dangerous qualities of the genre to the prolific critical attention of the present day, this Reader's Guide identifies the dominant approaches to sensation fiction and charts the critical trends of various scholarly evaluations and interpretations. With coverage spanning empire, class, sexuality and adaptation, this is the ideal companion for students of Victorian Literature looking for an introduction to the key debates surrounding sensation fiction.

"The late nineteenth-century fin de siècle has proved an enduringly fascinating moment in literary and cultural history. It is associated with the emergence of intriguing figures -- such as the 'new woman' and 'uranian'; with contradictory impulses -- of decadence and decay on the one hand, and of experiment and renewal, on the other; as well as with unprecedented intercultural exchange, especially between Britain and France. The 22 newly-commissioned essays collected here re-examine some of the key concepts taken to define the fin de siècle, while also introducing hitherto overlooked cultural phenomena into the frame, such as the importance of humanitarianism. The impact of recent research in material culture is explored, particularly how the history of the book and the history of performance culture is changing our understanding of this period. A wide range of cultural activities is discussed -- from participation in avant-garde theatre to interior decoration and from the writing of poetry to political and religious activism. Together, the essays provide new scholarly insights into British fin de siècle and enrich our understanding of this complex period, while paying particular attention to the importance of regionalism."--

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.

John Henry Newman (1801-1890) has always inspired devotion. Newman has made disciples as leader of the Catholic revival in the Church of England, an inspiration to fellow converts to Roman Catholicism, a nationally admired preacher and prose-writer, and an internationally recognized saint of the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, he has also provoked criticism. The church authorities, both Anglican and Catholic, were often troubled by his words and deeds, and scholars have disputed his arguments and his honesty. Written by a range of international experts, The Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman shows how Newman remains important to the fields of education, history, literature, philosophy, and theology. Divided into four parts, part one grounds Newman's works in the places, cultures, and networks of relationships in which he lived. Part two looks at the thinkers who shaped his own thought, while the third part engages critically and appreciatively with themes in his writings. Part four examines how those themes have shaped conversations in the churches and the academy. This Handbook will serve as an important resource to critical and appreciative exploration of the person, writings, controversies, and legacy of Newman.

In Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820-1900, Miriam Elizabeth Burstein analyzes the ways in which Christian novelists across the denominational spectrum laid claim to popular genres—most importantly, the religious historical novel—to narrate the aftershocks of 1829, the year of Catholic Emancipation. Both Protestant and Catholic popular novelists fought over the ramifications of nineteenth-century Catholic toleration for the legacy of the Reformation. But despite the vast textual range of this genre, it remains virtually unknown in literary studies. Victorian Reformations is the first book to analyze how “high” theological and historical debates over the Reformation’s significance were popularized through the increasingly profitable venue of Victorian religious fiction. By putting religious apologists and controversialists at center stage, Burstein insists that such fiction—frequently dismissed as overly simplistic or didactic—is essential for our understanding of Victorian popular theology, history, and historical novels. Burstein reads “lost” but once exceptionally popular religious novels—for example, by Elizabeth Rundle Charles, Lady Georgiana Fullerton, and Emily Sarah Holt—against the works of such now-canonical figures as Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, while also drawing on material from contemporary sermons, histories, and periodicals. Burstein demonstrates how these novels, which popularized Christian visions of change for a mass readership, call into question our assumptions about the nineteenth-century historical novel. In addition, her research and her conceptual frameworks have the potential to influence broader paradigms in Victorian studies and novel criticism.

Much has been written about the Victorian novel, and for good reason. The cultural power it exerted (and, to some extent, still exerts) is beyond question. The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel contributes substantially to this thriving scholarly field by offering new approaches to familiar topics (the novel and science, the Victorian Bildungroman) as well as essays on topics often overlooked (the novel and classics, the novel and the OED, the novel, and allusion). Manifesting the increasing interdisciplinarity of Victorian studies, its essays situate the novel within a complex network of relations (among, for instance, readers, editors, reviewers, and the novelists themselves; or among different cultural pressures - the religious, the commercial, the legal). The handbook's essays also build on recent bibliographic work of remarkable scope and detail, responding to the growing attention to print culture. With a detailed introduction and 36 newly commissioned chapters by leading and emerging scholars -- beginning with Peter Garside's examination of the early nineteenth-century novel and ending with two essays proposing the 'last Victorian novel' -- the handbook attends to the major themes in Victorian scholarship while at the same time creating new possibilities for further research. Balancing breadth and depth, the clearly-written, nonjargon -laden essays provide readers with overviews as well as original scholarship, an approach which will serve advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and established scholars. As the Victorians get further away from us, our versions of their culture and its novel inevitably change; this Handbook offers fresh explorations of the novel that teach us about this genre, its culture, and, by extension, our own.

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.

Machine generated contents note: Introduction; Part I. Forms of Devotion: 1. Bibles; 2. Prayer; Part II. Models of Faith: 3. The soldier; 4. The martyr; Part III. Last Things: 5. Death and judgement; 6. Heaven and hell

Rather than focus on the attraction exerted by the Mediterranean South on Northerners in search of health, pleasure, leisure and culture, the contributors to this book choose to bring out its less enticing aspects and the repugnance these induced in northern Europeans over four centuries, through a series of sixteen essays covering a geographical area stretching from Portugal to Turkey and Lebanon, from the Balkans to Egypt, and embracing several cultures, two religious faiths and very diverse populations. Most of them were read at an international conference held in Nice in April 2012, and were substantially revised for publication in this volume. All contributions centre around the manner in which British, German (and American) travellers, tourists, writers, thinkers, all members of Protestant modernizing nations rapidly rising in political and economic power reacted to their physical, or merely intellectual, encounter with a Mediterranean world whose pure light, warm sunshine and marvellous scenery could not make them overlook the fact that the glories of the classical past were now “set in the midst of a sordid present” (George Eliot in Middlemarch) and that the successors, possibly the descendants, of the Romans in the countries of the South were sunk in poverty, religious superstition and racial degeneracy. What emerges from these studies that draw on a variety of primary sources is nothing but cruelty, decrepitude, ignorance and obscurantism. With its dark side exposed, the Mediterranean bears little resemblance to the “exquisite lake,” the fons et origo of form and harmony, to which E. M. Forster compared it in A Passage to India. Beyond the portrayal of horrors, however, all essays attempt to unravel the historical conditions and the nexus of mentalités that determined or inspired the perception, imagination or representation of a dark Mediterranean and Near-Eastern world. Not only do they make a useful contribution to the elaboration of the Mediterranean as an intellectual construct, but their original angle of vision offers a valuable addition to the intellectual and cultural history of the North, telling more, perhaps, about the values, prejudices and certainties of northern Europeans than about the true nature of the Mediterranean South.