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The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism

Online ISBN:
9780191822551
Print ISBN:
9780199669509
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Medievalism

Joanne Parker (ed.),
Joanne Parker
(ed.)
Victorian Literature and Culture, University of Exeter
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Joanne Parker is Associate Professor in Victorian Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter. Her research interests are focused on Victorian medievalism, the Victorians and the prehistoric, and the relationships between place, history, literature, and identity more broadly. Her publications include Britannia Obscura (2014, 2015); England’s Darling: The Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great (2007); The Harp and the Constitution (2016); Written on Stone: The Cultural Reception of British Prehistoric Monuments (2009); and with Corinna Wagner, Art and Soul: Victorians and the Gothic (2014).

Corinna Wagner (ed.)
Corinna Wagner
(ed.)
Literature and Visual Culture, University of Exeter
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Corinna Wagner is Associate Professor in Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter. She has published chapters and articles on Victorian medieval architecture and Gothic literature, photography and nineteenth-century visual culture, art and anatomy, and the relationship between medicine and the arts. Her books include Art, Anatomy, and the Real (forthcoming), Pathological Bodies: Medicine and Political Culture (2013) and with Joanne Parker, Art and Soul: Victorians and the Gothic (2014), which accompanied the AHRC-supported exhibition at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter. She has also edited A Body of Work: An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine, with Andy Brown (2015) and Gothic Evolutions: Poetry, Tales, Context, Theory (2014).

Published online:
8 October 2020
Published in print:
15 September 2020
Online ISBN:
9780191822551
Print ISBN:
9780199669509
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Victorian medievalism physically transformed the streets of Britain. It lay at the root of new laws and social policies. It changed religious practices. It deeply coloured national identities. And it inspired art, literature, and music that remains influential to this day. Sometimes driven by nostalgia, but also often progressive and future-facing, this wide-reaching movement, which reached its peak during the reign of Queen Victoria, looked back to a range of different peoples and historical periods spanning a thousand years, in order to inspire and vindicate cultural, political and social change. Medievalism was pervasive in Victorian literature, with texts ranging from translated sagas to pseudo-medieval devotional verse, to triple-decker novels. It became a dominant architectural mode – transforming the English landscape, with 75% of new churches built on a ‘Gothic’ rather than a classical model, as well as museums, railway stations, town halls, and pumping stations. It was appealed to by both Whigs and Tories. But it also permeated domestic life – influencing the popularity of beards, the naming of children, and the design of homes and furniture. This landmark study is an attempt to draw together for the first time every major aspect of Victorian medievalism, and to examine the phenomenon from the perspective of the many disciplines to which it is relevant, including intellectual history, religious studies, social history, literary history, art history, and architecture. Bringing together the expertise of 39 experts from different subject areas, it reveals the pervasiveness and multi-faceted character of the movement in the nineteenth century, and explains its continuing legacy today.

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