Download or read book The Age of Doubt written by Christopher Lane and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Victorian era was the first great ";Age of Doubt"; and a critical moment in the history of Western ideas. Leading nineteenth-century intellectuals battled the Church and struggled to absorb radical scientific discoveries that upended everything the Bible had taught them about the world. In "The Age of Doubt," distinguished scholar Christopher Lane tells the fascinating story of a society under strain as virtually all aspects of life changed abruptly. In deft portraits of scientific, literary, and intellectual icons who challenged the prevailing religious orthodoxy, from Robert Chambers and Anne Bronte; to Charles Darwin and Thomas H. Huxley, Lane demonstrates how they and other Victorians succeeded in turning doubt from a religious sin into an ethical necessity. The dramatic adjustment of Victorian society has echoes today as technology, science, and religion grapple with moral issues that seemed unimaginable even a decade ago. Yet the Victorians'; crisis of faith generated a far more searching engagement with religious belief than the ";new atheism"; that has evolved today. More profoundly than any generation before them, the Victorians came to view doubt as inseparable from belief, thought, and debate, as well as a much-needed antidote to fanaticism and unbridled certainty. By contrast, a look at today';s extremes-;from the biblical literalists behind the Creation Museum to the dogmatic rigidity of Richard Dawkins';s atheism-;highlights our modern-day inability to embrace doubt."
Download or read book Victorian Faith in Crisis written by Richard J. Helmstadter and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Stanford University Press classic.
Download or read book Victorian Doubt written by Lance St. John Butler and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1990 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Crisis of Doubt written by Timothy Larsen and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-11-17 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Victorian crisis of faith has dominated discussions of religion and the Victorians. Stories are frequently told of prominent Victorians such as George Eliot losing their faith. This crisis is presented as demonstrating the intellectual weakness of Christianity as it was assaulted by new lines of thought such as Darwinism and biblical criticism. This study serves as a corrective to that narrative. It focuses on freethinking and Secularist leaders who came to faith. As sceptics, they had imbibed all the latest ideas that seemed to undermine faith; nevertheless, they went on to experience a crisis of doubt, and then to defend in their writings and lectures the intellectual cogency of Christianity. The Victorian crisis of doubt was surprisingly large. Telling this story serves to restore its true proportion and to reveal the intellectual strength of faith in the nineteenth century.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel written by Deirdre David and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-18 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new edition of this standard work, fully updated with four brand new chapters.
Download or read book The Serious Pleasures of Suspense written by Caroline Levine and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars have long recognized that narrative suspense dominates the formal dynamics of 19th-century British fiction. This study argues that various 19th-century thinkers - John Ruskin, Michael Faraday, Charlotte Bronte - saw suspense as a vehicle for a new approach to knowledge called "realism".
Download or read book Why Victorian Literature Still Matters written by Philip Davis and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-01-30 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why Victorian Literature Still Matters is a passionatedefense of Victorian literature’s enduring impact andimportance for readers interested in the relationship betweenliterature and life, reading and thinking. Explores the prominence of Victorian literature forcontemporary readers and academics, through the author’sunique insight into why it is still important today Provides new frames of interpretation for key Victorian worksof literature and close readings of important texts Argues for a new engagement with Victorian literature, fromgeneral readers and scholars alike Seeks to remove Victorian literature from an entrenched set ofvalues, traditions and perspectives - demonstrating how vital andresonant it is for modern literary and cultural analysis
Download or read book Faith and Doubt in Victorian Britain written by Elisabeth Jay and published by MacMillan Publishing Company. This book was released on 1986 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Victorian Period written by Robin Gilmour and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a thought-provoking synthesis of the Victorian period, focusing on the themes of science, religion, politics and art. It examines the developments which radically changed the intellectual climate and illustrates how their manifestations permeated Victorian literature. The author begins by establishing the social and institutional framework in which intellectual and cultural life developed. Special attention is paid to the reform agenda of new groups which challenged traditional society, and this perspective informs Gilmour's discussion throughout the book. He assesses Victorian religion, science and politics in their own terms and in relation to the larger cultural politics of the middle-class challenge to traditionalism. Familiar topics, such as the Oxford Movement and Darwinism, are seen afresh, and those once neglected areas which are now increasingly important to modern scholars are brought into clear focus, such as Victorian agnosticism, the politics of gender, 'Englishness', and photography. The most innovative feature of this compelling study is the prominence given to the contemporary preoccupation with time. The Victorians' time-hauntedness emerges as the defining feature of their civilisation - the remote time of geology and evolution, the public time of history, the private time of autobiography.
Download or read book Algernon Swinburne and Walter Pater written by SarahGlendon Lyons and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Perplext in Faith written by Alisa Clapp-Itnyre and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-02-27 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the last twenty years, there has been a growing recognition of the centrality of religious beliefs to an understanding of Victorian literature and society. This interdisciplinary collection makes a significant contribution to post-secularist scholarship on Victorian culture, reflecting the great diversity of religious beliefs and doubts in Victorian Britain, with essays on Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Unitarian, and spiritualist topics. Writing from a variety of disciplinary perspectives for an interdisciplinary audience, the essayists investigate religious belief using diverse historical and literary sources, including journalism, hymns, paintings, travel-writings, scientific papers, novels, and poetry. Essays in the volume examine topics including: • The relation between science and religion in the career of evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace (Thomas Prasch); • The continuing significance of the Bible in geopolitical discourse (Eric Reisenauer); • The role of children and children’s hymns in the missionary and temperance movements (Alisa Clapp-Itnyre); • The role of women in Christian and Jewish traditions (Julie Melnyk and Lindsay Dearinger); • The revival of Catholicism and Catholic culture and practices (Katherine Haldane Grenier and Michelle Meinhart); • The occult religious society Golden Dawn (Sharon Cogdill); • Faith in the writings of the Brontë sisters (Christine Colón), Charles Dickens (Jessica Hughes) and George Eliot (Robert Koepp).
Download or read book Victorian Poetry in Context written by Rosie Miles and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-08-29 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduces the poetry of the Victorian era (including writers like Browning, Rossetti and Tennyson) and its social, cultural and political contexts.
Download or read book Late Victorian Britain 1875 1901 written by J.F.C. Harrison and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-06-17 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing heavily on the recollections and literature of the people themselves, Harrison places late Victorian Britain firmly in its social and political context.
Download or read book Science and Religion in Neo Victorian Novels written by John Glendening and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Criticism about the neo-Victorian novel — a genre of historical fiction that re-imagines aspects of the Victorian world from present-day perspectives — has expanded rapidly in the last fifteen years but given little attention to the engagement between science and religion. Of great interest to Victorians, this subject often appears in neo-Victorian novels including those by such well-known authors as John Fowles, A. S. Byatt, Graham Swift, and Mathew Kneale. This book discusses novels in which nineteenth-century science, including geology, paleontology, and evolutionary theory, interacts with religion through accommodations, conflicts, and crises of faith. In general, these texts abandon conventional religion but retain the ethical connectedness and celebration of life associated with spirituality at its best. Registering the growth of nineteenth-century secularism and drawing on aspects of the romantic tradition and ecological thinking, they honor the natural world without imagining that it exists for humans or functions in reference to human values. In particular, they enact a form of wonderment: the capacity of the mind to make sense of, creatively adapt, and enjoy the world out of which it has evolved — in short, to endow it with meaning. Protagonists who come to experience reality in this expansive way release themselves from self-anxiety and alienation. In this book, Glendening shows how, by intermixing past and present, fact and fiction, neo-Victorian narratives, with a few instructive exceptions, manifest this pattern.
Download or read book How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain written by Leah Price and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-09 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.
Download or read book The J Hillis Miller Reader written by Joseph Hillis Miller and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology exhibits the diversity, inventiveness, and intellectual energy of the writings of J. Hillis Miller, the most significant North American literary critic of the twentieth century. From the 1950s onward, Miller has made invaluable contributions to our understanding of the practice and theory of literary criticism, the ethics and responsibilities of teaching and reading, and the role of literature in the modern world. He has also shown successive generations of scholars and students the necessity of comprehending the relationship between philosophy and literature. Divided into six sections, the volume provides more than twenty significant extracts from Millers works. In addition, there is a new interview with Miller, as well as a series of specially commissioned critical responses to Millers work by a number of the leading figures in literary and cultural studies today. Following a comprehensive critical introduction by the editor, each section has a brief introduction, directing the reader toward pertinent themes. There is also a comprehensive bibliography and a chronology of Millers professional life and activities. This reader, the first of Miller's work in English, provides an indispensable overview and introduction to one of the most original critical voices to have emerged since the inception of the teaching of English and American literature in universities in the English-speaking world.
Download or read book Genres of Doubt written by Elizabeth M. Sanders and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2017-05-08 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nineteenth-century Britain gave birth to the fantasy novel and the science fiction novel--two of today's most popular genres. During the same period, the traditional Christian beliefs that had underpinned British society for centuries faced new challenges as geological discoveries, the writings of Charles Darwin and exposure to other cultures gave rise to a Victorian "crisis of faith." These two shifts--one literary, one cultural--were deeply intertwined. The novel, a literary form that was developed as a vehicle for realism, when infused with unreal elements offered a space to ponder questions about the supernatural, the difference between belief and knowledge, and humanity's place in the world. The author explores how questions of meaning, identity and faith inspired the speculative fiction of today's novels, films, television shows and comics.
