Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain's Age of Print

by Joshua King

Overview

In Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain’s Age of Print, Joshua King demonstrates how nineteenth-century Britons turned to the printed page to imagine themselves in Christian communities spanning their nation. In contrast with traditional views of the nineteenth century, which regard the period as a turning point for religion from a public life to a privatized decline, Imagined Spiritual Communities argues that the rapid growth of print culture and a voluntary religious market inspired vigorous efforts to form virtual national congregations of readers.
 
Focusing primarily on the work of Anglicans between the 1820s and 1890s, this study begins by freshly interpreting reading and educational programs promoted by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Frederick Denison Maurice, and Matthew Arnold. King then traces the emergence of John Keble’s Christian Year as a catalyst for competing visions of a Christian nation united by private reading. He argues that this phenomenon illuminates the structure and reception of best-selling poetic cycles as diverse as Alfred Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Christina Rossetti’s late Verses.  Ultimately, Imagined Spiritual Communities reveals how dreams of print-mediated spiritual communion generated new poetic genres and rhetorical strategies, theories and theologies of media and reading, and ambitious schemes of education and church reform.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814251980
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	12/31/2015
Series:	Literature, Religion, & Postsecular Stud
Edition description:	1
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	(w) x (h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Joshua King is Associate Professor and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Robert Browning and Victorian Studies at Baylor University.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION--Religion, Reading, and Imagining Nineteenth-Century Britain

PART 1--APOLOGISTS FOR PRINT-MEDIATED SPIRITUAL COMMUNITIES
CHAPTER 1--Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection: The Clerisy and a National Spiritual Republic of Letters
CHAPTER 2--F. D. Maurice’s Universal Society: National Spiritual Community in a Sectarian Print Culture
CHAPTER 3--Arnold’s Poetic National Church: Anarchy and the Charming Force of Poetry

PART 2--VIRTUAL CONGREGATIONS AND PRINTED POETIC CYCLES
CHAPTER 4--John Keble’s Christian Year: Private Reading and Imagined National Religious Community
CHAPTER 5--Tennyson’s “New Christian Year”: In Memoriam and the Minimum of Faith
CHAPTER 6--In Memoriam’s Open Secret: The Public Forms of Private Faith
CHAPTER 7--Christina Rossetti’s Verses: A Multi-Fashioned Community of Strangers

CONCLUSION--The End of Print-Mediated Christian Britain and the Rise of Digital Spiritual Communities

Editorial Reviews

A much-needed contribution to nineteenth-century cultural studies, religious studies, and literary studies, Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain’s Age of Print is sure to draw national attention. Ranging across the nineteenth century, across genres, across cultural sites, King offers a lucid, learned history of the questions focusing interdisciplinary discussions in scholarship and public debate today.” —Susan Wolfson, Princeton University


"Joshua King's book is a timely new contribution to the Ohio State University Press's series on "Literature, Religion, and Postsecular Studies," a richly-researched study of nineteenth-century print culture as a part of religious culture and vice versa." —Review 19

From the Publisher