Norman Vance

Bible and Novel: Narrative Authority and the Death of God

1. God and the Bible, Secularisms and Novels 2. The Authority of the Bible 3. The Crisis of Biblical Authority 4. George Eliot s Secular Scriptures 5. Thomas Hardy: the Church and the Negation of Christianity 6. Mary Ward and the Problems of History 7. Rider Haggard: Adventures with the Numinous 8. Conclusion: Authority, the Novel and God

Imperial Rome and Britain's Language of Empire 1600–1837

Britains pre-Victorian overseas expansion stimulated Roman comparisons. But imperial Rome was a warning as much as an inspiration to future empires, a harsh and uncomfortable model for Britain as a former Roman colony. Roman dignity was claimed for British monarchs and achievements by Dryden and others. But there were mixed feelings about identifying expanding Britain as a second Roman Empire. In the eighteenth century the British freedom-fighter Caractacus, defeated by the Romans, appealed far more to popular taste than Virgils Aeneas or the Emperor Augustus. Sustained unease about imperial Rome, going right back to Tacitus, anticipated the liberal critique of imperialism of some Victorian and Edwardian commentators.

Helen Waddell and Maude Clarke, Irishwomen, Friends and Scholars

occurs. Performing Masculinity is a collection which manages to be both wideranging and coherent. The sheer diversity of contributions here points to the field’s endless potential for fertile discussion. The fact that some of the essays, such as Ho’s, reject the paranoid notion that masculinity in itself is inherently problematic, shows that developments in masculinities can be practiced as well as theorised. Performing Masculinity has enough range to ensure that no reader will approach every essay as an expert. However, it does have a common value: to reject the idea of masculinity as monolithic and unchanging. What it offers are contributions which are accessible and learned, witty and thought-provoking.

Making and remaking saints in nineteenth-century Britain

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Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age

This is an ambitious and wide-ranging essay in literary and intellectual history. It traverses more than two centuries, from Shakespeare to Shelley by way of worthies such as John Locke and Robert Lowth, the eighteenth-century biblical scholar. It also engages with more than half a century of academic literary criticism and cultural reflection, from early M.H. Abrams to late Terry Eagleton, not to mention social thinkers such as Charles Taylor and Jürgen Habermas. The terrain is rugged and difficult as well as extensive, and the book can be difficult too. It handles texts, history and language itself in sometimes unfamiliar ways in a sophisticated but not entirely successful attempt to identify and capture intimations not of immortality but of disquiet, elusive moments and modes of feeling and awareness surfacing in romantic writing to disturb the peace of allegedly reconfigured religion and enlightened reflection. The ‘unquiet things’ of the title come from ‘the sole unquiet thing’ in Coleridge’s poem ‘Frost at Midnight’, quoted on the first page, but Jager uses this haunting detail for his own purposes rather than as a way into Coleridge’s mood and mind. The Sublime, a natural link between romantic and quasi-religious or post-religious discourses of otherness, is introduced rather oddly into the discussion of Emma (p. 93), but not mentioned in discussion of Shelley’s ‘Mont Blanc’ where it has more obvious relevance. ‘Reform’, usually regarded as characteristic of the Victorian rather than the romantic era, is required for heavy if rather unspecific duty from page 4 onwards to describe the dynamic of the period. The apparently straightforward terms ‘melancholy’ (idiosyncratically deemed to be itself an ‘unquiet thing’) and ‘nothing’ are forced to carry problematic extra freight in the chapters entitled ‘The Melancholy of the Secular’ and ‘Wishing for Nothing’. Jager proposes stimulating, ingenious and unexpected connections, such as questionable political legitimacy linking Shakespeare and Fletcher’s play Henry VIII with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, or a link between Jane Austen’s Emma and the dissolution of the monasteries in chapter 3 (the connection is Mr Knightley’s home, Donwell Abbey). But even so the discussion presents problems of coherence which place too great a burden on the key term ‘secularism’. The book’s three sections are described in the Introduction (p. 23) as concerned, respectively, with the secular as a ‘form of governmentality’ (referring mainly to the reign of Henry VIII), ‘minoritisation’ (boldly adapted from Deleuze and Guattari, at some risk of anachronism, and defined as the ‘process of being rendered Book reviews

Yet Alive? Methodists in British Fiction since 1890

Halkin considers the graphic accounts of funeral practice described in the poems of Hanagid, from eleventh-century Andalucia, and the prayer of the kaddish, now clearly linked with funerals and commemoration, even though it was not originally a mourning prayer at all, but a prayer of praise to God marking the end of a section of the Torah, and a prayer which has clear links to the Christian Lord’s Prayer. He notes how the memorial yizkor, recited on Yom Kippor, asks God to remember the souls of father and mother and family members, and for all who were ‘killed, murdered, slaughtered, burned, drowned and suffocated for the sanctification of the Name’. ‘The Sanctification of the Name [of God] kiddush hashem is the Hebrew term for martyrdom’ and was probably originally composed for the many Jews killed in the Rhineland in 1091 (p. 183). This now, of course, extends to the victims of the Holocaust. Hillel notes significantly that in Israel today a secular version is often used in which it is not God but the people of Israel who are asked to remember. Hillel also notes that even among Orthodox Jews there is little writing or discussion about the afterlife, even though there may be much about when death comes and its bioethical implications. There have, however, been some who have engaged with accounts of ‘near-death’ experiences and their interpretation and have sought to align them with accounts of the afterlife in Jewish tradition. This accessible survey of death, mourning and the afterlife in the Jewish tradition is illuminating and informative – the personal, and often poignant, reflections in relation to the author’s own experience of death and bereavement give it an added engagement with what is clearly a rich tradition, many aspects of which are little known to Christian writers on the theology of death.

The Church in danger: Mrs Humphry Ward's The Case of Richard Meynell

The Case of Richard Meynell (1911), a sequel to Robert Elsmere, picks up on several generations of disquiet about the nature and function of the Church of England and its responses to social and intellectual change in the nation. It seeks to combine ‘Broad Church’ aspirations associated with Wards grandfather Thomas Arnold with new perspectives from Catholic Modernists and other reformers. It is argued that the plot of the novel is designed to provide examples and metaphors of the survival and development of underlying truth despite misunderstanding, practical problems and changes in outward forms of religious thought and expression.

Volunteer Thought: William Crawford of Strabane

Whatever might be said of political thought, political feeling in Ireland was running very high in and around 1782. This was the year the Volunteer Movement reached its peak of power and influence at its Dungannon Convention; it was also the year which inaugurated Grattan’s Parliament. A sense of violated rights had precipitated the successful armed revolt of the American colonists, some of whom were disaffected Irish, or of Irish descent, and the Volunteers, formed in response to domestic fears of invasion, had remembered that their country too had violated rights. Volunteering soon became a focus of patriotic pride and the Volunteers represented a stimulus to constitutional reform.1

Secular apocalyptic and Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardys Jude the Obscure (1895) makes ironically secular use of the imagery of the New Jerusalem and of unregenerate Babylon in the Book of Revelation. His purchase on the text is mediated both by Bunyans Pilgrim’s Progress, a childhood favourite, and hymns such as ‘Jerusalem the Golden’ translated from Bernard of Clunys De Contemptu Mundi. Avoiding the traditions of anti-Catholic interpretation, and of explicitly political readings which identify Babylon and the mysterious ‘number of the beast’ with particular historical adversaries and tyrants, Hardy uses the biblical text sardonically to demonstrate the inadequacy of escapist dreams and institutional religion and to explore problems of poverty and ambition complicated by sexuality and its cynical exploitation.