Sue Zemka's Books

Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society

By: Sue Zemka

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Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society

By: Sue Zemka

Sudden changes, opportunities, or revelations have always carried a special significance in Western culture, from the Greek and later the Christian kairos to Evangelical experiences of conversion. This fascinating book explores the ways in which England, under the influence of industrializing forces and increased precision in assessing the passing of time, attached importance to moments, events that compress great significance into small units of time. Sue Zemka questions the importance that modernity invests in momentary events, from religion to aesthetics and philosophy. She argues for a strain in Victorian and early modern novels critical of the values the age invested in moments of time, and suggests that such novels also offer a correction to contemporary culture and criticism, with its emphasis on the momentary event as an agency of change.

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Page Count

301

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1139503073

ISBN 13

9781139503075

Victorian Testaments

The Bible, Christology, and Literary Authority in Early-Nineteenth-Century British Culture

By: Sue Zemka

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Victorian Testaments

The Bible, Christology, and Literary Authority in Early-Nineteenth-Century British Culture

By: Sue Zemka

Victorian Testaments examines the changing nature of biblical and religious authority during the first half of the Victorian period. The book argues that these changes had a profound impact on concepts of cultural authority in general. Among the figures discussed are Coleridge, Thomas Arnold, Ruskin, Dickens, Florence Nightingale, and the missionaries of the British and Foreign Bible Society. In developing its picture of Victorian religious ideology, the book analyzes major works of the period, as well as works and documents that have received little critical attention. Its methods are interdisciplinary, building upon recent ideas in literary theory, cultural criticism, and gender studies. The book proposes that changes in religious faith and Bible reading tended in two directions, the one a celebration of spiritual individualism, the other of the nuclear family. As the credibility of a supernatural source for the scriptures diminished, the need for certainty in moral and religious matters was increasingly filled by the importance attached to individual character. Those Victorians who nurtured their individual character on Bible reading were understood to reveal the perfect spirit of the scripturesjust as the scriptures themselves, it seemed, could no longer do so. However, the desire for religious heroes was counterpoised by another and highly sentimentalized model of the spiritual life, one where religious authority was decentered across a social spectrum of fathers, mothers, and children. In this second direction explored by the book, a complex economy of spiritual power and authority is created by the distribution of sexual, intellectual, and affective attributes to figures who together constitute the nuclear familyone might say the secular holy family. By tracing these two narrative patternsthe intellectual drama of the spiritual hero and the sentimental saga of the nuclear familythe author demonstrates that the spirituality of many nineteenth-century texts was not an allegory of transcendence so much as a by-product of the narratives themselves. A large-scale cultural confrontation with the disappearance of God was, to a certain extent, deferred by narratives that picked up the slack in faith, creating performances of sacred power with characters who demonstrated either an awesome religious interiority or a recognizably sentimental display of idealized femininity or childhood innocence.

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Page Count

310

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804728488

ISBN 13

9780804728485

Victorian Testaments

The Bible, Christology, and Literary Authority in Early-Nineteenth-Century British Culture

By: Sue Zemka

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Victorian Testaments

The Bible, Christology, and Literary Authority in Early-Nineteenth-Century British Culture

By: Sue Zemka

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

310

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804728488

ISBN 13

9780804728485

Book's by Sue Zemka

Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society

Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society

Victorian Testaments

Victorian Testaments

Victorian Testaments

Victorian Testaments

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