Publications

On a regular basis, we compile and circulate a bulletin highlighting recent publications in the field. Past bulletins are archived below:

December 2024

Blumberg, Ilana. George Eliot: Whole Soul. Oxford University Press, 2024. Discount code: AAFLYG6.

In this new account of George Eliot’s spiritual life, George Eliot: Whole Soul, Ilana Blumberg reveals to us a writer who did not simply lose her faith once and for all on her way to becoming an adult, but devoted the full span of her career to imagining a wide religious sensibility that could inform personal and social life. As we range among Eliot’s letters, essays, translations, poetry, and novels, we encounter here a writer whose extraordinary art and intellect offer us company, still today, in the search for modern meaning.

Dau, Duc. Sex, Celibacy, and Deviance: The Victorians and the Song of Songs. Ohio State  University Press, 2024.

Sex, Celibacy, and Deviance is the first major study to explore the Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon) in Victorian literature and art. As the Bible’s only erotic poem, the Song of Songs is the canonical Judeo-Christian book about love, furnishing the Victorians with an authoritative and literary language for love, marriage, sex, mourning, and religious celibacy. Duc Dau adopts a queer and feminist lens to consider how Victorians employed and interpreted the Song of Songs in their work. How did writers and artists fashion and, most importantly, challenge the norms of gender, romantic love, and marriage? Spanning the early Victorian era through the first two decades of the twentieth century, Sex, Celibacy, and Deviance considers the works of Charlotte Brontë, Thomas Hardy, Christina Rossetti, John Gray, Michael Field, Edward Burne-Jones, and Simeon Solomon alongside two lesser-known figures: Irish-born Scottish artist Phoebe Anna Traquair and the Catholic religious leader Augusta Theodosia Drane. By addressing the relevance of the Song of Songs in light of shifting and conflicting religious and social contexts, Dau provides a fresh perspective on Victorian literature, religion, and culture.

Dyck, Denae. Biblical Wisdom and the Victorian Literary Imagination. Bloomsbury Academic, 2024. Discount code: GLR AQ4.

Examining the creative thought that arose in response to 19th-century religious controversies, this book demonstrates that the pressures exerted by historical methods of biblical scholarship prompted an imaginative recovery of wisdom literature. During the Victorian period, new approaches to the interpretation of sacred texts called into question traditional ideas about biblical inspiration, motivating literary transformations of inherited symbols, metaphors, and forms. Drawing on the theoretical work of Paul Ricoeur, Denae Dyck considers how Victorian writers from a variety of belief positions used wisdom literature to reframe their experiences of questioning, doubt, and uncertainty: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George MacDonald, George Eliot, John Ruskin, and Olive Schreiner. This study contributes to the reassessment of historical and contemporary narratives of secularization by calling attention to wisdom literature as a vital, distinctive genre that animated the search for meaning within an increasingly ideologically diverse world.

Dwor, Richa. “Two Diasporas, One Exodus: Jewish Freedom and Jamaican Slavery in Grace Aguilar’s Sephardic Histories.” Victorian Popular Fictions, vol. 5, no. 2, Autumn 2023, pp. 104-118, https://doi.org/10.46911/PMUK7383.

This paper reads Anglo-Jewish author Grace Aguilar’s (1816–47) writings on Sephardic history in light of the financial benefits accrued by Aguilar’s family from the ownership of enslaved people in Jamaica. It also emphasizes the influence of the messianic writings of her great-grandfather Benjamin Dias Fernandes to argue that the intensity of Aguilar’s identification with English literary forms and perspectives does not indicate a tendency toward assimilation. Rather, Britain was for her a site of redemption. Its status as a haven for persecuted Sephardim – as the end point of their exile and wanderings – was not merely civic, but also eschatological.

Hurley, Michael D. Angels and Monotheism. Cambridge University Press, 2024.

While angels have played a decisive role in all the world’s major religions and continue to loom large in the popular religious and creative imagination, modern theology has tended to ignore or trivialize them. The comparatively few scholarly works on angels over the last century have typically interpreted them as mere symbols and metaphors: they are said to offer glimpses not of the divine order, but of human desires, anxieties, and ideologies. Angelology has collapsed into anthropology. By contrast, this polemical book argues for the indispensable importance of studying angels as divinely created beings, for theology at large, and for understanding the defining doctrine of monotheistic religions in particular. Additionally, the book contends that the spirit of modern science did not originate with the so-called Scientific Revolution but was actually inspired centuries earlier by the angelological lucubrations of medieval scholastics.

Johnson, Alyssa Q. “Prophecies and Parables in Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Lois the Witch.'” Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, vol. 145 (2024), pp. 71 – 86,  https://doi.org/10.1353/vct.2024.a931643.

King, Joshua. “The Democratisation of the Bible: Education, Economics, Ecology.” The Nineteenth Century, ed. Elisabeth Jay in The Bible and Western Christian Literature: Books and the Book, 5 vols., ed. Elisabeth Jay and Stephen Pricket et al.    (T&T Clark Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024), pp. 353-396.

Lecourt, Sebastian, and Winter Jade Werner (eds). Special issue on “Transimperial Religion.” Victorian Studies vol. 66 no. 2 (Winter 2024), pp. 193–200. Read the open-access introduction here and a short blog post here. Contributions listed below:

Lee, Helen. “Dissonant Poetics in George Eliot’s ‘A College Breakfast Party.” Victorian Poetry vol. 61 no. 1 (2023), pp. 55–69, https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.2023.a905521.

This article examines George Eliot’s understudied poem “A College Breakfast Party” (1878), analyzing how its dissonant poetic elements reflect deeper philosophical tensions about faith, knowledge, and intellectual discourse in the period. Through close readings of the poem’s irregular meter, shifting perspectives, and deliberately awkward philosophical debates, Lee demonstrates how Eliot employs formal dissonance to mirror the fragmentary nature of modern knowledge and the limitations of purely rational discourse. By situating the poem within both Eliot’s later career and broader Victorian debates, this study reveals how “A College Breakfast Party” uses its challenging poetic form to engage with questions about the integration of scientific and humanistic knowledge.

McQueen, Joseph. Liturgy, Ritual, and Secularization in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2024. Discount code: LRSN2024.

Simultaneously spiritual and material, liturgy incarnates unseen realities in concrete forms – bread, wine, water, the architectural arrangement of churches and temples. Nineteenth-century writers were fascinated with liturgy. In this book Joseph McQueen shows the ways in which Romantic and Victorian writers, from Wordsworth to Wilde, regardless of their own personal beliefs, made use of the power of the liturgy in their work. In modernity, according to recent theories of secularization, the natural opposes the supernatural, reason (or science) opposes faith, and the material opposes the spiritual. Yet many nineteenth-century writers are manifestly fascinated by how liturgy and ritual undo these typically modern divides in order to reinvest material reality with spiritual meaning, reimagine the human as malleable rather than mechanical, and enflesh otherwise abstract ethical commitments. McQueen upends the dominant view of this period as one of scepticism and secularisation, paving the way for surprising new avenues of research.

Stainthorp, Clare. “Periodical Form and Chatterton’s Commune, the Atheistic Communistic   Scorcher (1884–1895): ‘the most Unique Production of the—Nineteenth Century.’  Media History vol 30 no. 2 (2024), pp. 148–70, https://doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2024.2329065.

Werner, Winter Jade. “Spatial Contingency: Digital Networks, James Hogg, and the Religious Politics of Space.” Romantic Circles Praxis.

Writing on the relationship between unboundedness and fanaticism, Winter Jade Werner’s essay on the politics of despatialization in Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner demonstrates a like investment in the tangible and bounded while demonstrating the pitfalls of assuming virtuality’s equivalence with parity. Charting the rhetorical similarities between the international Protestantism of the early nineteenth century and more recent cyber-utopianism, Werner analyzes the novel’s intersection of spatial and religious politics. Drawing from Hogg’s deft analysis of fanaticism, Werner demonstrates how we, like Hogg, might usefully counter presentist myopia by resisting history’s artifactualization in order to reveal the contingencies of the now.

William Combe, The Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of the Picturesque. Edited by Ben Wiebracht et al. Williamsburg, VA: Pixelia Publishing, 2024.

Wiebracht, Ben et. al. “Jane Austen, Doctor Syntax, and the Regency Mass Market.”  Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal Online. Forthcoming in early 2025.

Vernon, Amanda. “Speaking with the Dead: Resurrective Reading and Pneumatological Imagination in George MacDonald. Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature vol. 146 (Winter 2024), pp. 279 – 295.  https://doi.org/10.1353/vct.00022

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.

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.

December 2022

February 2022

Sept 2021

May 2021