Willful Submission - Sado-Erotics and Heavenly Marriage in Victorian Religious Poetry (Hardcover)

Victorian England: a Jesuit priest writes of wrestling with God at night, limbs entangled; an Anglican sister begs Jesus, her divine lover, to end her aching anticipation of their union; a clergyman exhorts nuns to study the example of medieval women who suffered on the rack in order to become ""brides"" of Christ. Alongside the march of nineteenth-century progress ran a seemingly paradoxical fascination with a dark, erotically suggestive side of religious devotion: the figuration of the Christian God as a heavenly bridegroom who doles out punishment to his bride, the individual soul. Through innovative case studies of Victorian religious poetry, Amanda Paxton reveals that while the punitive model proved a convenient rhetorical tool with which to deflate burgeoning nineteenth-century campaigns for women’s rights and challenges to Church authority, in the hands of several writers it also provided a means of resisting patriarchal institutions and interrogating distinctions between science and religion. Willful Submission is the first full-length volume to examine the interplay of sex, suffering, and religion as a touchstone in Victorian culture and verse.

General

Imprint:	University of Virginia Press
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	Victorian Literature and Culture Series
Release date:	December 2017
Authors:	Amanda Paxton
Series editors:	Herbert F. Tucker
Dimensions:	229 x 152mm (L x W)
Format:	Hardcover - Cloth over boards
Pages:	272
ISBN-13:	978-0-8139-4077-9
Categories:	Books
LSN:	0-8139-4077-X
Barcode:	9780813940779

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