On a regular basis, we compile and circulate a bulletin highlighting recent publications in the field. Past bulletins are archived below:
December 2023
Brorby, Joshua. “Christ Among the Decadents: Re-Encountering Religion in Edwin Arnold’s The Light of the World.” Victorian Poetry 61.2 (Summer 2023): 143–59.
Cox, Brenda. Fashionable Goodness: Christianity in Jane Austen’s England. Topaz Cross, 2022.
- Easily the most readable and student-friendly overview of late Georgian/Regency religion I know of. The primary audience is Austen lovers, and Austen is indeed a constant touchstone in this book. But it has sections on the daily life and duties of clergy, evangelicalism, threats to the Anglican Church, etc., that could be assigned in a class not about Austen. Much of the material on the clergy and the structure of the Anglican Church applies to the Victorian period as well. My favorite feature — every use of a word in the glossary (vicar, patronage, prebendary, etc.) has an asterisk, not just the first. Very handy for students if you’re just assigning a chapter or two.
Dieleman, Karen. “From Grass to Galaxy: Alice Meynell’s Poetic Wayfaring in the Meshwork
of the World.” Christian Environmentalism and Human Responsibility in the 21st Century: Questions of Stewardship and Accountability. Edited by Katherine M. Quinsey. Routledge, 2023, pp. 108–126.
Drawing on sociologist Tim Ingold and theologian Norman Wirzba, this chapter in Christian Environmentalism and Human Responsibility in the 21st Century discusses how Alice Meynell (1847-1922) pursues an integrated theology-ecology in her poetry by envisioning the created world as a meshwork held together by Christ. Meynell considers the incarnated, crucified, and yet living Christ as continuing to inhabit or wait within or walk among the grain, grass, grapes and galaxies of the world, devoted to their particularity. Christ’s wayfaring among the elements of the world and his way-of-being for them marks the world, such that each element also has a particular way of being and becoming. Included in this tropos is any person — but especially the poet — who goes as a wayfarer among things and not as a traveler past objects. Such a poet, attuned to the spiritual topography of creation, also wayfares through language toward the surprise often lurking in the ordinary.
Dixon, Joy. “Maude Royden (1876–1956) and the ‘Sacrament of Love.’” Modern Believing 64.4 (Autumn 2023): 406–12.
Dixon, Joy. “Sex Magic as Sacramental Sexology: Aleister Crowley’s Queer Masculinity.” Correspondences: Journal for the Study of Esotericism 10.1 (2022): 17–47.
Dixon, Joy. “‘Thoughts Are Things’: Theosophy, Religion, and the History of the Real.”
Hetherington, Naomi and Clare Stainthorp (eds). Special issue “Religion and Victorian Popular Literature.” Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, 5.2 (2023).
The international network of contributors to this special issue emphasises how recent critical strategies for engaging with popular texts enable us to paint a different and more complex picture of the Victorian religious landscape. Key thematic contributions include exploring the role of religion to the formation of new literary markets and genres, revising the “conflict thesis” between religion and science, the importance of popular literary forms in constructing and communicating theological ideas, and responding to recent calls to decolonise Victorian Studies.
- Helena Goodwyn. “Sex Religion Sells! The Preacher, the Journalist and the Novel”
- Niyati Sharma. “Finding the ‘Ideal’: F. Marion Crawford’s Mystical Theology and Literary Form in Mr. Isaacs”
- Éadaoin Agnew. “‘Physically this universe is one’: Universal Unity in Swami Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga”
- Adele Guyton. “Marvellous Conquests: The Adventures of Christianity and Astronomy in the Boy’s Own Paper (1889–1900)”
- Denae Dyck. “Spiritual Authority for a (Post)Secular Age: Olive Schreiner’s Dreams as Literary Theology”
- Steve Asselin. “The Providential Genocides: Racial Survival and Acts of God in Fin-de-Siècle Apocalyptic Fiction”
- Richa Dwor. “Two Diasporas, One Exodus: Jewish Freedom and Jamaican Slavery in Grace Aguilar’s Sephardic Histories”
Journal of the American Academy of Religion 89, 4 (December 2021): 1171–79.
Goldhill, Simon (ed). Victorian Engagements with the Bible and Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2023.
Hu, Esther. “Becoming Kuniong: Vocal Encounter and Female Missionary Work in Gutian,
China (1893–1895)”. Ordinary Oralities: Everyday Voices in History, edited by
Josephine Hoegaerts and Janice Schroeder, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg,
2023, pp. 17–30. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111079370-002.
Hurley, Michael. “The Charge of God: Laudato Si’ read through Chesterton, Wordsworth, and Hopkins.” Literature and Theology 37.3 (September 2023): 216–40.
Johnson, Alyssa. “Charlotte Dacre.” Victorian Jewish Writers Project. Co-edited by Lindsay Katzir and Brandon Katzir. https://victorianjewishwritersproject.org/.
King, Joshua. “Christina Rossetti’s Cosmic Liturgy and Challenge to Anthropocentrism.” Ecoflourishing and Character: Multidisciplinary Christian Perspectives, ed. Steven Bouma-Prediger and Nathan Carson. Routledge 2023, pp. 86–99.
Knight, Mark and Charles LaPorte (eds). Special issue on “Talking about Religion in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Studies.” Modern Language Quarterly 83.4 (December 2022).
- This special issue features essays by Lori Branch, Timothy Larsen, Jan-Melissa Schramm, Colin Jager, Peter Coviello, Alex Hernandez, Dawn Coleman, Winter Jade Werner and Mimi Winick, and Emma Mason (afterword by Deidre Lynch).
Newman, Beth. “The Secular Messianism of Robert Elsmere: Race, Jewishness, and the “New
Reformation”.” Victorian Studies 65, no. 1 (2022): 93–116. https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2022.a901287.
“The Nineteenth-Century Religious Other.” Syllabus Cluster, Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom.
- This cluster features Alyssa Johnson’s “Nineteenth-Century Jewish British Literature,” Dana Shaaban’s “The Muslim “Other” in Nineteenth-Century British Literature,” and Sanjana Chowdhury’s “Hinduism and Imperial Interventions in Victorian Literature.”
Pond, Kristen. Strangers and the Enchantment of Space in Victorian Fiction, 1830–1865. Routledge, 2023.
- Chapter 3 (“Giving to Strangers: The Charitable Home Visit in Victorian Fiction”) explores the home visit as a form of charity that runs counter to the anonymous, detached approach to the poor that was informed by the move toward centralization and standardization in the nineteenth century. Personal encounters with strangers promote a view of social relations that recognizes the ties that bind people together. This enchanted view of selfhood, in the opinion of the guidebooks and fictions explored in this chapter, could enact ethical change that would improve the conditions of the poor and class relations. I pair Harriet Martineau and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna together because they exist on opposite ends of the political spectrum, which makes their similar approach to the poor stranger in their fiction surprising. Both writers suggest a balance of impersonal and personal strategies when engaging with the poor, a blend they achieve in their fiction by combining objectivity and sympathy (Martineau) and the factual and the imaginative (Tonna). The way that each of these woman writers imagined the encounter with strangers from a different class was influenced by their beliefs in evangelicalism and sociology. Following the important work of scholars such as Lori Branch, Mark Knight, Talal Asad, and others, I adopt a postsecular reorientation as my methodology for reading Martineau and Tonna. The stories they tell us, I suggest, reveal an engagement with belief about facts and belief about fiction that one might identify as motivated by both faith and secular utility such that their epistemological positions, sociology for Martineau and evangelicalism for Tonna, begin to intersect in key ways. The possibility that these positions could work together can help us identify the intersections between fiction, faith, and science.
Religion and Literature 55.1 (Spring 2023): special issue on “John Henry Newman: Reading the Times.” https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/51731.
Roukema, Aren. “Testimony, Fiction, and the Science of the Mind: Occult Empiricism and A.P. Sinnett’s Karma: A Novel.” Journal of Literature and Science vol. 15 (2022): 1–22.
- The article analyzes how testimony mediated mental scientific concepts and approaches between mental physiology, occultism, psychical research, and fiction in the nineteenth century. To illustrate this mediation, it explores the particularly indicative example of Karma: A Novel by Alfred Percy Sinnett, an influential early leader of the Theosophical Society. Karma is fiction meant to entertain, but it is also a space for science in which Sinnett earnestly outlines a methodology for an “occult empiricism”, heavily reliant on accepting testimony as scientific evidence.
Styler, Rebecca. The Maternal Image of God in Victorian Literature. Routledge, 2023.
Werner, Winter Jade. “Little Dorrit and the Structure of Belief.” Literature and Theology 37.3 (Sept 2023): 241–55.