Strange Gods: Love and Idolatry in the Victorian Novel (Among the Victorians and Modernists)
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- Synopsis
- Despite frequent declarations of the sanctity of love and marriage, British Protestant culture nurtured the fear that human affection might easily slip into idolatry. Throughout the nineteenth-century, theological essays, sermons, hymns, and didactic fiction and poetry urged the faithful to maintain a constant watch over their hearts, lest they become engrossed by human love, guilty of worshipping the creature rather than the Creator. Strange Gods: Love and Idolatry in the Victorian Novel traces the concerns produced in Protestant culture by this broad interpretation of idolatry. In chapters focusing on Charles Kingsley and Charlotte Brontë, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Thomas Hardy, this volume shows that even supposedly secular novels obsessively reenact an ideological clash between Protestant faith and human love. Anxiety about adoring humans more than God frequently overshadows and sometimes derails the progress of romance in Victorian novels. By probing this anxiety and its narrative effects, Strange Gods uncovers how a central Protestant belief exerts its influence over stories about love and marriage.
- Copyright:
- 2021
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- Book Size:
- 200 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9781000484885
- Related ISBNs:
- 9780367525095, 9781003058236, 9780367525125
- Publisher:
- Taylor and Francis
- Date of Addition:
- 11/29/21
- Copyrighted By:
- Timothy L. Carens
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- Literature and Fiction, Language Arts
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.