Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature
Distributed for Liverpool University Press
324 pages
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6 x 9
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© 2007
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.
Brontë Studies
"The book delivers much useful contextual information for the general reader and the Brontë specialist in particular. . . . Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature makes a worthwhile contribution to Brontë studies. It not only places Brontë's literary treatment of Catholicism in a wider literary and cultural context, but it also joins Brontë criticism to the wider conversation about reilgion in the Victorian era that is taking place today."
Andrew Maunder
"An insightful and genuinely fresh piece of work, detailed and well-argued. The author ranges widely across both canonical and non-canonical works and makes many excellent observations about them."
-- Andrew Maunder, University of Hertfordshire
-- Andrew Maunder, University of Hertfordshire
Cahiers Victoriens & Edouardiens
"A beautiful work that is a pleasure to read: balanced, rich, nuanced in its textual analyses."
-- Cahiers Victoriens & Edouardiens
-- Cahiers Victoriens & Edouardiens
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Sensational Invasions: The Jesuit, the State and the Family
Charles Kingsley's Westward Ho! and Wilki Collins's The Black Robe
2. Nuns and Priests: Sensations of the Cloister
Charlotte Brontë's Villette and the Monologues of Robert Browning
3. Persecution and Martyrdom: The Law and the Body
Grace Aguilar's The Vale of Cedars, or The Martyr and George Eliot's Romola
4. Feeling the Great Change: Conversion and the Authority of Affect
Benjamin Disraeli's Lothair, J.H. Shorthouse's John Inglesant and Mary Ward's Helbeck of Bannisdale
5. Art Catholicism and the New Catholic Baroque
The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Francis Thompson
Epilogue
Works Cited
Index
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