Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion

这个研究项目调查了宗教信仰在世纪早期到中期的表现方式，特别关注“形式”的兴起及其在创造和塑造信仰中的重要性。通过研究建筑、教堂仪式和仪式、音乐和诗歌等学科对形式的强调，我认为，19世纪的神学和文学评论家认为，无论是哥特式教会建筑的大拱门，还是共同背诵的诗篇，还是诗行的节奏，重复的、精心构造的形式的使用对崇拜者的影响至关重要，抚慰，平静，创造一种信仰的潜在稳定感。牛津运动的兴起，强调更新传统的形式和仪式，增加了这些想法的动力，但不一定是唯一的因素。通过研究来自不同基督教教派的诗人和作家，我将表明，对形式的新强调不仅仅是英国圣公会特有的关注，而且对英国的异议和罗马天主教有重要的影响。这项研究将重新审视丁尼生，布朗宁，伊丽莎白巴雷特布朗宁，杰拉德曼利霍普金斯和克里斯蒂娜罗塞蒂等作家的主要作品，但它也将把他们的作品放在新的背景下，将其与许多被忽视的宗教诗人的作品进行比较，这些诗人的作品在他们的时代被广泛传播，但现在已经被遗忘。此外，这项研究具有很强的跨学科方面，因为它检查了正确的教堂建筑，音乐在教堂仪式中的使用，以及仪式主义的争议的辩论。世纪早期出现的教堂建造和修复浪潮，部分是受到了这样一种观念的启发，即教堂服务是一项整体性的事业，在这项事业中，礼拜者周围环境和行为的各个方面结合在一起，形成了一个精心构建的整体。因此，在19世纪的英国，关于正确使用仪式、教堂的适当设计特征以及礼拜者在礼拜仪式中的作用的期刊和报纸文章、布道、小册子和小册子中的热烈讨论远非枯燥的学术或美学辩论，而是至关重要的，关系到基督教信仰和礼拜的本质。这些争论也在文学中进行，通过这一时期的诗歌和小说。维多利亚时代的宗教语言和维多利亚时代的诗学语言在处理形式和信仰问题的文本中交织在一起。虽然这项研究集中在一个特定的历史时期，它的影响超出了这方面的问题，感觉需要仪式和仪式的崇拜，以及文学的情感功能，在生产宗教信仰。它还谈到了最近的批评和理论兴趣的文学形式及其功能。

This research project investigates the ways in which religious faith was represented in the early to mid-nineteenth century, focusing particularly on the rise of 'form' and its perceived importance in creating and shaping faith. By studying the emphasis on forms in the disciplines of architecture, church ritual and ceremony, music and poetry, I will argue that nineteenth-century theological and literary commentators saw the use of repetitive, carefully structured forms / whether in terms of the sweeping arches of Gothic ecclesiastical architecture, the shared recital of a psalm, or the rhythm of a poetic line / as vital in their effect upon the worshipper, soothing, calming and creating a sense of the underlying stability of faith. The rise of the Oxford Movement, with its strong emphasis on renewing traditional forms and ceremonies, added impetus to these ideas but was not necessarily the only factor. By studying poets and authors from across different Christian denominations I will show that the new emphasis on form was not simply a peculiarly Anglican concern, but had important implications for Dissent and for Roman Catholicism in Britain.This study will re-examine major works by authors such as Tennyson, Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Christina Rossetti, but it will also place their work in fresh contexts by comparing it to the writings of many neglected religious poets, poets whose work was widely disseminated in their day but have now been forgotten. In addition, this study has a strong interdisciplinary aspect, as it examines the debates over correct church architecture, the use of music in church ceremony, and the ritualism controversies. The wave of church-building and church restoration that took place in the early nineteenth century was in part inspired by notions of the church service as a holistic enterprise in which every aspect of the worshipper's surroundings and actions combined to form a carefully constructed whole. Far from being dry academic or aesthetic debates, therefore, heated discussions in periodical and newspaper articles, sermons, pamphlets and tracts about the correct use of ritual, the appropriate design features for a church and the role of the worshipper in the service were vital in relation to the nature of Christian faith and worship in nineteenth-century Britain. These debates were also carried on in literature, through the poems and novels of the period. The language of Victorian religion and the language of Victorian poetics is intertwined in texts which deal with questions of form and faith. Although this research concentrates on a particular historical period, it has implications beyond this in terms of questions about the felt need for ritual and ceremony in worship, and the affective function of literature in producing religious faith. It also speaks to recent critical and theoretical interest in literary form and its function.