Overview
- Revises prevalent assumptions about the religious imagination in nineteenth-century literature
- Reappraises the function of Victorian representations of the sacred in forming the nation and empire
- Links psycholinguistic and pscyhogeographical frameworks to reveal the construction of Victorian religious discourses
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture (PNWC)
Buy print copy
About this book
This book describes how Christian sacred geographies were represented in Victorian literature. It demonstrates first how those from the Hebrew Bible and the Old and New Testaments had become politically domesticated and psychologically assimilated to sustain the Victorian Protestant imagination in art and literature. It then examines how, following the relocation of the centre of Christendom from Jerusalem to Rome in the Middle Ages, the geographical axis between Rome and Britain had been disrupted during the period of Catholic penalisation but was restored by Emancipation and conversion in the nineteenth century. As a result of these national relocations, a literary atlas of sacred heterotopias, other worlds, was mapped by Protestant and Catholic writers within their industrial-imperialist period. Intended for a primary readership of academics and researchers in the field of Victorian Literature, Religious Studies and History, it focuses on the works of nine writers in a variety of genres, including poetry, novels, art criticism, and historical, literary and theological essays.
Keywords
- Victorian Literature
- Literature and Space
- Literature and Cultural Studies
- John Ruskin
- Thomas Carlyle
- Benjamin Disraeli
- George Eliot
- Alice Meynell
- John Henry Newman
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
- Historical Geography
- Roman Catholicism
- Anglicanism
- Psychogeographies
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Keith Hanley is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University, UK. He has been working on this book for some years since founding and directing two research centres devoted to Wordsworth and Ruskin. He is the founding co-editor of Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal and his most recent book, John Ruskin's Continental Tour 1835: The Written Records and Drawings (2016) won the Ruskin Society Book Prize in 2017.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Sacred Geographies in Victorian Literature
Book Subtitle: Protestant and Catholic Refigurings of the Bible and Christian Tradition
Authors: Keith Hanley
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-75184-4Due: 12 April 2025
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-75187-5Due: 12 April 2026
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-75185-1Due: 12 April 2025
Series ISSN: 2634-6494
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6508
Edition Number: 1
Number of Illustrations: 10 b/w illustrations