Wordsworth and English Literary Pilgrimage in the Nineteenth Century
Refashioning the Nation’s Sacred Imaginary
Wordsworth and English Literary Pilgrimage in the Nineteenth Century
Refashioning the Nation’s Sacred Imaginary
Description
Using Wordsworth as a focal point, this book describes how, in the period of Romanticism and beyond, the historical practice of pilgrimage became internalised figuratively and psychologically so as to represent Christian discourse in nineteenth-century English literature.
It surveys the imaginative relocation of Jerusalem and Rome to real and present places, thereby creating the nation's sacred imaginary. Wordsworth is presented as central to founding a literary religious discourse on the sacred site of the Lake District. Also explored are the ways in which other Victorian writers such as Ruskin and Newman participated in that construction by their own literary pilgrimages.
Overall, this book revises assumptions about the decline of the religious imagination in nineteenth-century English literature and fundamentally reappraises the function of Romantic and Victorian representations of the sacred in forming the nation and empire.
Table of Contents
The Sacred Imaginary
Continuities
The Sacred Symbolic
Psychological Pilgrimage
This Book
Part I. The Return of the Sacred
1 Romantic Sacralization
The New Dawn
The Wordsworth Paradigm
2 Literary Pilgrimage
The English Lakes
New Jerusalems
Rome
Part II. Wordsworth's Grand Pilgrimage
3 The Interior Journey
A Silent Echo
The Boys of Winander
Redoublings
'Winander'
4 The Anglican Sublime
Sublimes
Brotherly Faculties
Crossings
The Sacred Nation
5 Excursions
Return Journeys
The Irish Tour
The Via Media
Part III. Sacred Spaces
Preamble
6 Three Psychogeographies
Wordsworth's 'Sacred Ground'
Ruskin 'On the Old Roads'
Newman's Itinerary of Assent
Select Bibliography
Index
Product details
| Published | 10 Jul 2025 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Extent | 240 |
| ISBN | 9781350476028 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 10 bw illus |
| Series | New Directions in Religion and Literature |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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