19th-century religious controversies
A01=Lesley Higgins
anti-Catholicism
Author_Lesley Higgins
body studies
Category=DS
Category=DSBF
Category=JBSF
Category=QRV
Christian subjectivity
confessional manuals
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
gender studies
Gerard Manley Hopkins
heterotopias
History of Sexuality
Ignatius
Michel Foucault
penitential theology
Pre-Raphaelitism
Punch magazine
religious conversion
rituals of confession
Spiritual Exercises
the body of Christ
Tractarians
Victorian Christianity
Walter Pater
Product details
- ISBN 9780813953212
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 26 Jun 2025
- Publisher: University of Virginia Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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A new theoretical reading of the renowned poet and Jesuit priest
Confessing the Flesh is an expansive, interdisciplinary analysis of how aesthetic and religious discourses function in dialogue in the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the celebrated Victorian-era poet and Catholic priest. Through Hopkins, Lesley Higgins reveals how religion was expressed, lived, and debated in the nineteenth century. Both a comprehensive analysis of innovative Victorian poetry and a cultural history of confession, this book builds on previous Hopkins criticism by adopting a new approach informed by feminist and Foucauldian theory. With its analysis of the cultural conditions and power relations that sustained religious belief and poetic expression in the Victorian age, Confessing the Flesh offers new insights on the perennial question of Hopkins’s religious commitments. And with its examination of everything from theological treatises to Punch cartoons, Higgins’s exploration of Hopkins’s confessional modes uncovers the ways that gender and nation become implicated in confessional controversies and fleshly entanglements.
Confessing the Flesh is an expansive, interdisciplinary analysis of how aesthetic and religious discourses function in dialogue in the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the celebrated Victorian-era poet and Catholic priest. Through Hopkins, Lesley Higgins reveals how religion was expressed, lived, and debated in the nineteenth century. Both a comprehensive analysis of innovative Victorian poetry and a cultural history of confession, this book builds on previous Hopkins criticism by adopting a new approach informed by feminist and Foucauldian theory. With its analysis of the cultural conditions and power relations that sustained religious belief and poetic expression in the Victorian age, Confessing the Flesh offers new insights on the perennial question of Hopkins’s religious commitments. And with its examination of everything from theological treatises to Punch cartoons, Higgins’s exploration of Hopkins’s confessional modes uncovers the ways that gender and nation become implicated in confessional controversies and fleshly entanglements.
Lesley Higgins is Professor of English at York University in Canada and the author of The Modernist Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetic and Gender Politics.
