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Muscular Christianity

Embodying the Victorian Age

Donald E Hall editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:15th Sep '94

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Muscular Christianity cover

An extremist mid-Victorian religious philosophy influencing gender, class and national identity.

This volume focuses on muscular Christianity as a violent, sexist, religious philosophy, containing strong ideological links with the work of mainstream Victorian writers. Throughout this book, muscular Christianity is shown to be at the heart of issues of gender, class and national identity in the Victorian age.Muscular Christianity was an important religious, literary and social movement of the mid-nineteenth century. This volume draws on recent developments in culture and gender theory to reveal ideological links between muscular Christianity and the work of novelists and essayists, including Kingsley, Emerson, Dickens, Hughes, MacDonald and Pater, and to explore the use of images of hyper-masculinized male bodies to represent social as well as physical ideals. Muscular Christianity argues that the ideologies of the movement were extreme versions of common cultural conceptions, and that anxieties evident in Muscular Christian texts, often manifested through images of the body as a site of socio-political conflict, were pervasive throughout society. Throughout, muscular Christianity is shown to be at the heart of issues of gender, class and national identity in the Victorian age.

"Although as multivalent as the movement they address, these essays cohere very well...rendering the collection here much greater than the sum of its parts." Kathyrn Murphy Anderson, College Literature

ISBN: 9780521453189

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 19mm

Weight: 550g

260 pages