Liturgy, Ritual, and Secularization in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Auteur
Joseph McQueen is Associate Professor of English at Northwest University (Kirkland, Washington). His chapter on 'Rituals and Sacraments' will appear in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Religion in Victorian Literary Culture. He has published articles in SEL Studies in English Literature, European Romantic Review, and Christianity & Literature.

Texte du rabat

"Liturgy incarnates unseen realities in concrete forms - bread, wine, water, the architectural arrangement of religious buildings. Uncovering a nineteenth-century fascination with liturgy, Joseph McQueen here shows how Romantic and Victorian writers used such forms in their work to invest ordinary material life with spiritual and ethical meaning"--

Résumé
Liturgy incarnates unseen realities in concrete forms bread, wine, water, the architectural arrangement of religious buildings. Uncovering a nineteenth-century fascination with liturgy, Joseph McQueen here shows how Romantic and Victorian writers used such forms in their work to invest ordinary material life with spiritual and ethical meaning.

Contenu

1. Mediating the modern: Wordsworth's Liturgical Subjectivity; 2. Memory and revolution: ritual time in Wordsworth's Prelude; 3. Tractarian liturgies: John Keble, Charlotte Yonge, and the deification of ordinary life; 4. Realist liturgies: enfleshing ethics in the novels of George Eliot and Mary Ward; 5. Liturgical aestheticism: Walter Pater's sacralization of the body; 6. Against immanence: Oscar Wilde's liturgical constructivism; Epilogue.