Confessing the Flesh

Reading Hopkins in Context

Lesley Higgins

$296

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

University of Virginia Press
26 June 2025

Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 ; Aspects of religion (non-Christian); Gender studies, gender groups

Series: Victorian Literature and Culture Series

A new theoretical reading of the renowned poet and Jesuit priest

Confessing the Flesh is an expansive, interdisciplinary analysis of how aesthetic and religious discourses function in dialogue in the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the celebrated Victorian-era poet and Catholic priest. Through Hopkins, Lesley Higgins reveals how religion was expressed, lived, and debated in the nineteenth century. Both a comprehensive analysis of innovative Victorian poetry and a cultural history of confession, this book builds on previous Hopkins criticism by adopting a new approach informed by feminist and Foucauldian theory. With its analysis of the cultural conditions and power relations that sustained religious belief and poetic expression in the Victorian age, Confessing the Flesh offers new insights on the perennial question of Hopkins’s religious commitments. And with its examination of everything from theological treatises to Punch cartoons, Higgins’s exploration of Hopkins’s confessional modes uncovers the ways that gender and nation become implicated in confessional controversies and fleshly entanglements.

By: Lesley Higgins
Imprint: University of Virginia Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 25mm
ISBN: 9780813953205
ISBN 10: 0813953200
Series: Victorian Literature and Culture Series
Pages: 300
Publication Date: 26 June 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Lesley Higgins is Professor of English at York University in Canada and the author of The Modernist Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetic and Gender Politics.