Sacred Geographies in Victorian Literature

“This book offers an extremely original reading of key figures in the Victorian period in relation to what the author calls ‘sacred geographies’, a term which embraces direct engagements with place, the epistemology of topological structures, psychological and physical journeys, and imagery of journeying and movement. Keith Hanley’s deep knowledge of religious debates in the Victorian period, and of Victorian literature on religious topics, is everywhere evident.”

—Matthew Bradley, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Liverpool

This book describes how Christian sacred geographies were represented in Victorian literature. It demonstrates first how those from the Hebrew Bible and the Old and New Testaments had become politically domesticated and psychologically internalised to sustain the Victorian Protestant imaginary in art and literature. It then examines how, following the relocation of the centre of Christendom from Jerusalem to Rome in the Middle Ages, the geographical axis between Rome and Britain had been disrupted during the period of Catholic penalisation but was restored by Emancipation and conversion in the nineteenth century. As a result of these national relocations, a literary atlas of sacred heterotopias, other worlds, was mapped by Protestant and Catholic writers within their industrial-imperialist period. Intended for a primary readership of academics and researchers in the field of Victorian Literature, Religious Studies and History, it focuses on the works of nine writers in a variety of genres, including poetry, novels, art criticism, and historical, literary and theological essays.

Keith Hanley is Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Lancaster University, UK. He has been working on this book for some years since founding and directing two research centres devoted to Wordsworth and Ruskin. He is the founding co-editor, with Greg Kucich, of Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal and his most recent book, John Ruskin's Continental Tour 1835: The Written Records and Drawings (2016), won the Ruskin Society Book Prize in 2017.