Religious Imaginariesexplores liturgical practice as formative for how three Victorian women poets imagined the world and their place in it and, consequently, for how they developed their creative ...and critical religious poetics. In doing so, this new study rethinks several assumptions in the field: that Victorian women's faith commitments tend to limit creativity; that the contours of church experiences matter little for understanding religious poetry; and that gender is more significant than liturgy in shaping women's religious poetry.Exploring the import of bodily experience for spiritual, emotional, and cognitive forms of knowing, Karen Dieleman explains and clarifies the deep orientations of different strands of nineteenth-century Christianity, such as Congregationalism's high regard for verbal proclamation, Anglicanism and Anglo-Catholicism's valuation of manifestation, and revivalist Roman Catholicism's recuperation of an affective aesthetic. Looking specifically at Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Adelaide Procter as astute participants in their chosen strands of Christianity, Dieleman reveals the subtle textures of these women's religious poetry: the different voices, genres, and aesthetics they create in response to their worship experiences. Part recuperation, part reinterpretation, Dieleman's readings highlight each poet's innovative religious poetics.Dieleman devotes two chapters to each of the three poets: the first chapter in each pair delineates the poet's denominational practices and commitments; the second reads the corresponding poetry.Religious Imaginarieshas appeal for scholars of Victorian literary criticism and scholars of Victorian religion, supporting its theoretical paradigm by digging deeply into primary sources associated with the actual churches in which the poets worshipped, detailing not only the liturgical practices but also the architectural environments that influenced the worshipper's formation. By going far beyond descriptions of various doctrinal positions, this research significantly deepens our critical understanding of Victorian Christianity and the culture it influenced.
Questions We Share Dieleman, Karen
Literature & theology,
12/2022, Volume:
36, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Abstract
For my Victorian literature course of autumn 2022, I set myself a goal of not privileging either the secularisation thesis or a potential sacramentalisation thesis, but of helping students ...see that serious writers almost always address the same set of foundational questions—even as, given their individuality and context, they respond to them differently, as we all do. In the Reformed Christian tradition, such foundational questions are understood to inform all academic inquiry, making all teaching and research neither religiously neutral nor radically relative. Within this context, I consider with my students the question ‘what foundational questions does the religious impulse at the heart of humankind ask?’ through a renewed reading of Genesis 1–3.
Religious Imaginaries explores liturgical practice as formative for how three Victorian women poets imagined the world and their place in it and, consequently, for how they developed their creative ...and critical religious poetics. In doing so, this new study rethinks several assumptions in the field: that Victorian women’s faith commitments tend to limit creativity; that the contours of church experiences matter little for understanding religious poetry; and that gender is more significant than liturgy in shaping women’s religious poetry. Exploring the import of bodily experience for spiritual, emotional, and cognitive forms of knowing, Karen Dieleman explains and clarifies the deep orientations of different strands of nineteenth-century Christianity, such as Congregationalism’s high regard for verbal proclamation, Anglicanism and Anglo-Catholicism’s valuation of manifestation, and revivalist Roman Catholicism’s recuperation of an affective aesthetic. Looking specifically at Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, and Adelaide Procter as astute participants in their chosen strands of Christianity, Dieleman reveals the subtle textures of these women’s religious poetry: the different voices, genres, and aesthetics they create in response to their worship experiences. Part recuperation, part reinterpretation, Dieleman’s readings highlight each poet’s innovative religious poetics. Dieleman devotes two chapters to each of the three poets: the first chapter in each pair delineates the poet’s denominational practices and commitments; the second reads the corresponding poetry. Religious Imaginaries has appeal for scholars of Victorian literary criticism and scholars of Victorian religion, supporting its theoretical paradigm by digging deeply into primary sources associated with the actual churches in which the poets worshipped, detailing not only the liturgical practices but also the architectural environments that influenced the worshipper’s formation. By going far beyond descriptions of various doctrinal positions, this research significantly deepens our critical understanding of Victorian Christianity and the culture it influenced.
...while Blain likely intends otherwise, her phrase "interesting shifts in perspective" damns with faint praise not helped by the apparent explanation, "No doubt all of these ideas formed part of the ...debate internalized by many intelligent Victorians" (p. 86). Published first in Fraser's Magazine in August 1879, this sonnet was likely Pfeiffer's last composition as she compiled Sonnets and Songs (advertised in January 1880 and reported on February 14, 1880, as received by The Academy).33 Thus by late 1879-ahead of and often different from most other poets named in this study-Pfeiffer had discarded any faith in evolution as contributing to inner human progress, and, indeed, believed the opposite enough to place her hopes in an ethic of Love to which humans actively contributed through their choices-an ethic that would, without projecting any physical, intellectual, or moral improvement, give life meaning.
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI AND THE BIBLE follows many roads in existing Christina Rossetti scholarship, so many that at times I struggled to track its own valuable contribution—namely, the claim that ...Rossetti’s literary corpus embodies an Augustinian-inflected vision of personhood, one constituted within the communion of saints, characterized by existential waiting, and sustained by typological readings of the Bible. Rossetti’s mixing of temporal and spatial details in these poems corresponds, Ludlow argues, to “an existential perspective that encounters the whole of Scripture simultaneously as the living word that has transformative power” (84). Karen Dieleman KAREN DIELEMAN is an associate professor of English as well as Humanities Chair at Trinity Christian College.
3 Margaret Reynolds and Marjorie Stone have each argued persuasively that Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh is just such a revisionary, gynocentric form of sage discourse.4 Stone argues, for ...example, that while Aurora Leigh, enters the tradition of Victorian sage writing through its representation of a prophetic speaker and its vision of a new social and spiritual order, it intentionally subverts the authoritative stance of sage figures such as Carlyle by embodying the quest for a sustaining Life Philosophy through not one but three interconnected spiritual autobiographies, of which two are women's (pp. 138, 149).
In contrast to the long publishing careers of Barrett Browning and Rossetti, Adelaide Procter’s public poetic career spanned only nine years: it began in 1853 with a poem printed in ...Dickens’sHousehold Wordsand concluded in 1862 withA Chaplet of Verses,which Procter prepared as a fund-raiser for the Providence Row Night Refuge, a shelter for homeless women and children managed by the Sisters of Mercy.¹ The poetry published over this decade voices Procter’s Roman Catholic imaginary in different ways: sometimes subtly, sometimes overtly. Procter’s poetry of the earliest years after her conversion from Anglicanism does not yet manifest
CONCLUSION Dieleman, Karen
Religious Imaginaries,
08/2012
Book Chapter
In his sermon entitled “Increase of Faith,” the Reverend James Stratten of Paddington Chapel identifies three avenues by which “conviction and enjoyment are realized in the mind.”¹ His identification ...of the senses as an inlet of knowledge is both Lockean and Romantic; his extended valuation of intellect is both Augustinian and Enlightenment-inflected; and his naming of faith as the third and greatest inlet of knowledge reaches as far back as the biblical proverb “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (where “fear” means reverence). Actually, not just the latter but all three “inlets of knowledge” are affirmed
