Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture PDF
Preview Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture
This page intentionally left blank Victorian women poets lived in a time when religion was a vital aspect of their identities. Cynthia Scheinberg examines Anglo- Jewish (Grace Aguilar and Amy Levy) and Christian (Elizabeth BarrettBrowningandChristinaRossetti)womenpoets,andargues that there are important connections between the discourses of ninteenth-century poetry, gender, and religious identity. Further, Scheinberg argues that Jewish and Christian women poets had a specialinterestinJewishdiscourse;callingonimagesfromJudaism andtheHebrewScriptures,theirpoetrycreatedcomplexarguments abouttherelationshipsbetweenJewishandfemaleartisticidentity. ShesuggeststhatJewishandChristianwomenusedpoetryasasite for creative and original theological interpretation, and that they entered into dialogue through their poetry about their own and each other’s religious and artistic identities. This book’s interdis- ciplinary methodology calls on poetics, religious studies, feminist literarycriticism,andlittlereadAnglo-Jewishprimarysources. Cynthia Scheinberg is Associate Professor of English at Mills College in Oakland, California. She has published articles in VictorianStudies,VictorianLiteratureandCulture,VictorianPoetry,andhas contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (Cambridge, ), Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre, –, and Critical Essays on Elizabeth Barrett Browning. CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE Generaleditor GillianBeer,UniversityofCambridge Editorialboard IsobelArmstrong,BirkbeckCollege,London LeonoreDavidoff,UniversityofEssex TerryEagleton,UniversityofManchester CatherineGallagher,UniversityofCalifornia,Berkeley D.A.Miller,ColumbiaUniversity J.HillisMiller,UniversityofCalifornia,Irvine MaryPoovey,NewYorkUniversity ElaineShowalter,PrincetonUniversity Nineteenth-century British literature and culture have been rich fields for interdisciplinarystudies.Sincetheturnofthetwentiethcentury,scholarsand criticshavetrackedtheintersectionsandtensionsbetweenVictorianliterature andthevisualarts,politics,socialorganization,economiclife,technicalinnova- tions,scientificthought–inshort,cultureinitsbroadestsense.Inrecentyears, theoretical challenges and historiographical shifts have unsettled the assump- tionsofpreviousscholarlysynthesesandcalledintoquestionsthetermsofthe olderdebates.Whereasthetendencyinmuchpastliterarycriticalinterpretation was to use the metaphor of culture as “background,” feminist, Foucauldian, and other analyses have employed more dynamic models that raise questions ofpowerandofcirculation.Suchdevelopmentshavereanimatedthefield. Theseriesaimstoaccommodateandpromotethemostinterestingworkbeing undertaken on the frontiers of the field of nineteenth-century literary studies: work which intersects fruitfully with other fields of study such as history, or literarytheoryorthehistoryofscience.Comparativeaswellasinterdisciplinary approachesarewelcomed. Acompletelistoftitlespublishedwillbefoundattheendofthebook. WOMEN’S POETRY AND RELIGION IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND Jewish Identity and Christian Culture CYNTHIA SCHEINBERG Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge , United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521811125 © Cynthia Scheinberg 2002 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2002 - isbn-13 978-0-511-07287-1 eBook (EBL) - isbn-10 0-511-07287-2 eBook (EBL) - isbn-13 978-0-521-81112-5 hardback - isbn-10 0-521-81112-0 hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of s for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Thisbookisdedicatedto: DanielA.Harris,teacherandfriend DeniseandHerbertScheinberg,parentsandfriends EliahuJ.Klein,husbandandfriend. ***** TheDavidL.KalstoneMemorialFund, administeredbytheDepartmentofEnglishatRutgersUniversity, offeredgeneroussupporttowardsthepublicationofthisbook. Contents Acknowledgments pageix Introduction “Sweet singers of Israel”: gendered and Jewish otherness inVictorianpoetics ElizabethBarrettBrowningandthe“Hebraicmonster” Christina Rossetti and the Hebraic goblins of the Jewish Scriptures “Judaism rightly reverenced”: Grace Aguilar’s theological poetics AmyLevyandtheaccentsofminor(ity)poetry Notes Bibliography Index vii
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