Liturgy, Ritual, and Secularization in Nineteenth-Century British Literature

Joseph McQueen (Northwest University)

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English

Cambridge University Press
21 November 2024

Series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Simultaneously spiritual and material, liturgy incarnates unseen realities in concrete forms – bread, wine, water, the architectural arrangement of churches and temples. Nineteenth-century writers were fascinated with liturgy. In this book Joseph McQueen shows the ways in which Romantic and Victorian writers, from Wordsworth to Wilde, regardless of their own personal beliefs, made use of the power of the liturgy in their work. In modernity, according to recent theories of secularization, the natural opposes the supernatural, reason (or science) opposes faith, and the material opposes the spiritual. Yet many nineteenth-century writers are manifestly fascinated by how liturgy and ritual undo these typically modern divides in order to reinvest material reality with spiritual meaning, reimagine the human as malleable rather than mechanical, and enflesh otherwise abstract ethical commitments. McQueen upends the dominant view of this period as one of scepticism and secularisation, paving the way for surprising new avenues of research.

By: Joseph McQueen (Northwest University)
Imprint: Cambridge University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Weight: 539g
ISBN: 9781009435956
ISBN 10: 1009435957
Series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Pages: 262
Publication Date: 21 November 2024
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

1. Mediating the modern: Wordsworth's Liturgical Subjectivity; 2. Memory and revolution: ritual time in Wordsworth's Prelude; 3. Tractarian liturgies: John Keble, Charlotte Yonge, and the deification of ordinary life; 4. Realist liturgies: enfleshing ethics in the novels of George Eliot and Mary Ward; 5. Liturgical aestheticism: Walter Pater's sacralization of the body; 6. Against immanence: Oscar Wilde's liturgical constructivism; Epilogue.

Joseph McQueen is Associate Professor of English at Northwest University (Kirkland, Washington). His chapter on 'Rituals and Sacraments' will appear in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Religion in Victorian Literary Culture. He has published articles in SEL Studies in English Literature, European Romantic Review, and Christianity & Literature.