Overview

Using Wordsworth as a focal point, this book describes how, in the period of Romanticism and beyond, the historical practice of pilgrimage became internalised figuratively and psychologically so as to represent Christian discourse in nineteenth-century English literature. It surveys the imaginative relocation of Jerusalem and Rome to real and present places, thereby creating the nation’s sacred imaginary. Wordsworth is presented as central to founding a literary religious discourse on the sacred site of the Lake District. Also explored are the ways in which other Victorian writers such as Ruskin and Newman participated in that construction by their own literary pilgrimages. Overall, this book revises assumptions about the decline of the religious imagination in nineteenth-century English literature and fundamentally reappraises the function of Romantic and Victorian representations of the sacred in forming the nation and empire.

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9781350476004

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Keith Hanley is a very well-known scholar, eminent in his field, who has published excellent material on Wordsworth and Victorian topics. After long study of Victorian literature, he has written a book which brings his research to its culmination. Cogently argued and imaginatively illustrated, it treats judiciously selected texts in an informative manner, pitching itself well for lay reader and scholar alike. It is rare to find a scholar who so ably combines a gift for theory with an ability to provide close reading. * Professor Lucy Newlyn, Emeritus Fellow in English, University of Oxford, UK * Keith Hanley brings together the fruits of a lifetime's study of the long nineteenth century in following the geographical and psychic trails of Wordsworth, Ruskin and Newman who all travelled far in order to reestablish a specifically British sacred imaginary. Contesting secularising narratives, the study offers compelling readings of Wordsworth's development of an Anglican sublime, while discerning in all three of its literary subjects a psychogeography of the spirit. Erudite and elegant, this study takes familiar writers to new places. * Alison Milbank, Emeritus Professor of Theology and Literature, University of Nottingham, UK *

Author Information

Keith Hanley is Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Lancaster University, UK.

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