Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age(Series Number 2 Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture)

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.

Table of Contents:
List of contributors; Acknowledgements; Introduction: muscular Christianity: reading and writing the male social body Donald E. Hall; Part I. Foundations of Muscular Christianity: 1. The volcano and the cathedral: muscular Christianity and the origins of primal manliness David Rosen; 2. On the making and unmaking of monsters: Christian socialism, muscular Christianity, and the metaphorization of class conflict Donald E. Hall; 3. Christian manliness and national identity: the problematic construction of a racially 'pure' nation C. J. W.-L. Wee; Part II: Varieties of Muscular Christianity: 4. Charles Kingsley's scientific treatment of gender Laura Fasick; 5. Young England: muscular Christianity and the politics of the body in Tom Brown's Schooldays Dennis W. Allen; 6. Muscular spirituality in George MacDonald's Curdie Books John Pennington; 7. 'Degenerate effeminacy' and the making of a masculine spirituality in the sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson Susan L. Roberson; Part III. Responses to Muscular Christianity: 8. The confidence man: empire and the deconstruction of muscular Christianity in The Mystery of Edwin Drood David Faulkner; 9. The re-subjection of 'Lucas Malet': Charles Kingsley's daughter and the response to muscular Christianity Patricia Srebrnik; 10. Pater's muscular aestheticism James Eli Adams; Index.

Review :
"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