Hunger, Poetry and the Oxford Movement: The Tractarian Social Vision

(Paperback)

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Focusing on the influence of the Oxford Movement on key British poets of the nineteenth-century, this book charts their ruminations on the nature of hunger, poverty and economic injustice. Exploring the works of Christina Rossetti, Coventry Patmore, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Adelaide Anne Procter, Alice Meynell and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Lesa Scholl examines the extent to which these poets not all of whom were Anglo-Catholics themselves engaged with the Tractarian social vision when grappling with issues of poverty and economic injustice in and beyond their poetic works. By engaging with economic and cultural history, as well as the sensorial materiality of poetry, Hunger, Poetry and the Oxford Movement challenges the assumption that High-Church politics were essentially conservative and removed from the social crises of the Victorian period.

Reviews

[The] book is a striking effort to trace the influence of Tractarianism on Victorian literature in a new way, extending out of theology into the social and political sphere. * Modern Language Review *
This book is both brilliant and urgent. Broadly and incisively probing the aesthetic and social practices of Tractarian reserve, Lesa Scholl revises our understanding of Victorian poetry and Victorian religion while also speaking to social injustice in our own time. * Linda K. Hughes, Addie Levy Professor of Literature, TCU *
This bold new study of the influence of the Tractarian doctrine of Reserve on Victorian poetry and poetics radically reframes our thinking about Anglo-Catholic engagement with nineteenth-century social issues. Tractarianism, often characterised as more interested in matters of theology, liturgy and ritual than social justice and activism, is revealingly explored instead in light of its concern with poverty and hunger. In this lively and revisionist account, the poets whose formative years were shaped by the Oxford Movement are re-presented as agents of a social mission as crucial to their religious and social identity as that of their Evangelical peers. * Professor Hilary Fraser, Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth-Century Studies, Birkbeck, University of London *

Author Bio

Lesa Scholl is Head of Kathleen Lumley College, University of Adelaide, Australia. Her previous publications include Translation, Authorship and the Victorian Professional Woman (2011) and Hunger Movements in Early Victorian Literature (2016).