Victorian Discourses on Sexuality and Religion

Download or read book Victorian Discourses on Sexuality and Religion written by John Maynard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Maynard's original and provocative study looks at sexuality and religion as creations of language, in the literary and cultural discourses of Victorian England. After a wide-ranging introduction (drawing on myth, anthropology, comparative religion and the history of sexuality) Maynard goes on to articulate and interpret the strikingly complex and varied ways in which the earnest sceptic Arthur Hugh Clough, the Protestant Charles Kingsley, and the Catholic convert Coventry Patmore placed the relation of sexuality and religion at the centre of their work. A final chapter on Jude the Obscure demonstrates Thomas Hardy's deconstruction of the endeavour to make sense of sexuality and religion, fragmenting this inherited discourse into mere words and bodily parts, in a disintegration of the great constructive vision of his predecessors.