• Cambridge Scholars Publishing

    "[Engaging Art: Essays and Interviews from Around the Globe is a] collection of astonishing scope, Roslyn Bernstein delves into archives, exhibits, the built environment, and the lively characters who create them. She keenly engages the creativity that enriches, probes, and inspires the world."

    - Alisa Solomon, Columbia University, USA

“Perplext in Faith”: Essays on Victorian Beliefs and Doubts

In the last twenty years, there has been a growing recognition of the centrality of religious beliefs to an understanding of Victorian literature and society. This interdisciplinary collection makes a significant contribution to post-secularist scholarship on Victorian culture, reflecting the great diversity of religious beliefs and doubts in Victorian Britain, with essays on Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Unitarian, and spiritualist topics. Writing from a variety of disciplinary perspectives for an interdisciplinary audience, the essayists investigate religious belief using diverse historical and literary sources, including journalism, hymns, paintings, travel-writings, scientific papers, novels, and poetry.

Essays in the volume examine topics including:

• The relation between science and religion in the career of evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace (Thomas Prasch);

• The continuing significance of the Bible in geopolitical discourse (Eric Reisenauer);

• The role of children and children’s hymns in the missionary and temperance movements (Alisa Clapp-Itnyre);

• The role of women in Christian and Jewish traditions (Julie Melnyk and Lindsay Dearinger);

• The revival of Catholicism and Catholic culture and practices (Katherine Haldane Grenier and Michelle Meinhart);

• The occult religious society Golden Dawn (Sharon Cogdill);

• Faith in the writings of the Brontë sisters (Christine Colón), Charles Dickens (Jessica Hughes) and George Eliot (Robert Koepp).


Alisa Clapp-Itnyre is Professor of English and Director of the Honors Program at Indiana University East. She is the author of Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs: Music as Social Discourse in the Victorian Novel (Ohio UP, 2002) and Nineteenth-Century British Children’s Hymnody: Re-Tuning the History of Childhood with Chords and Verses (Ashgate).

Julie Melnyk teaches in the English Department at the University of Missouri. She is the author of Victorian Religion: Faith and Life in Britain (Praeger, 2008), and editor of Women’s Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Garland, 1998) and, with Nanora Sweet, Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century (Palgrave, 2001).

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Sharon Cogdill

Christine Colón

Katherine Grenier

Jessica Ann Hughes

Robert Koepp

Michelle Meinhart

Thomas Prasch

Eric Reisenauer

Buy This Book

ISBN: 1-4438-6814-0

ISBN13: 978-1-4438-6814-3

Release Date: 18th February 2015

Pages: 345

Price: £52.99

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