Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture

Andrew Bradstock, Sue Morgan, S. Gill, A. Hogan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN:
  9780333802533
• eBook ISBN:
  9780230294165
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Literature

In its specially-commissioned fourteen chapters, this important book discusses an impressively wide range of issues around the theme of male spirituality in the nineteenth century, drawing from history, cultural studies, art history and literary criticism. Topics explored include: ideological and iconographical representations of masculinity across the major Christian denominations; militarism and hymnody; male homosexuality and homoeroticism. The book is not afraid to explore controversial areas, nor to go beyond the generally acknowledged 'canon' of prescribers of gender identity: it includes, for example, leading nonconformist figures like William Booth and Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and early gay writers like John Addington Symonds.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Soldiers and Saints: the Fighting Man and the Christian Life
• 2 The (Re)Gendering of High Anglicanism
• 3 Victorian Masculinity and the Virgin Mary
• 4 ‘Reading Men More Truly’: Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
• 5 Angry Yonge Men: Anger and Masculinity in the Novels of Charlotte M. Yonge
• 6 Aelred of Rievaulx, Same-Sex Desire and the Victorian Monastery
• 7 Man Apart: Priesthood and Homosexuality at the End of the Nineteenth Century
• 8 Male Sexuality, Religion and the Problem of Action: John Addington Symonds on Arthur Hugh Clough
• 9 ‘The Mightiest Evangel of the Alpine Club’: Masculinity and Agnosticism in the Alpine Writing of John Tyndall
• 10 ‘Slugs and Snails and Puppy Dogs’ Tails’? George Eliot, Masculinity and the (Ir)religion of Nationalism
• 11 Ecce Homo: Representations of Christ as the Model of Masculinity in Victorian Art and Lives of Jesus
• 12 ‘Writing the Male Body’: Sexual Purity and Masculinity in The Vanguard, 1884–94
• 13 Soul-saving Partnerships and Pacifist Soldiers: the Ideal of Masculinity in the Salvation Army
• 14 ‘A Man of God is a Manly Man’: Spurgeon, Luther and ‘Holy Boldness’
• Index