Religion and Literature in the Nineteenth Century

Sara Coleridge's Phantasmion (1837) is often identified as the first English fantasy novel. It has usually been read as an intentionally inconsequential work, meant to be enjoyed for its own sake. This paper proposes an alternative reading of the novel, one that views it as part of Coleridge's larger body of theological work. Phantasmion's form as a fantasy novel and the story that unfolds within that form are narrative expressions of her theology. This argument is developed along three lines: First, Coleridge expressly wrote that narrative and fairy tales are the best mode through which children are educated on Christianity. Second, Phantasmion's emphasis on the sanctification of its protagonist anticipates the concerns of her later Dialogues on Regeneration. Third, reading Phantasmion through the lens of Tolkien's "eucatastrophe" reveals that recovering the agency of women is essential to the renewal and restoration of the world.

This paper examines The Gold Thread (1860) by Norman MacLeod as a piece of literary pedagogy in a programme of Christianised Bildung. Written during an explosion of children’s literature in Victorian Britain, The Gold Thread is the first children's book written in literary form. MacLeod's use of literary form both illustrates and enacts his convictions concerning childhood education, which, I argue, were influenced by Freidrich Schiller’s vision of the education of the “beautiful soul"; a vision starkly contrasted to the highly moralised Victorian children's literature of the time. While MacLeod's connection to broader nineteeth century literary and philosophical trends have been largely ignored, this paper explores how MacLeod's Christian adaptation of the notion of Bildung and his use of literary form helped shift religious conceptions of the moral and spiritual lives of children in Britain, contributing to a social movement that culminated in the abolition of children’s labor in Scotland.

In this paper, I examine Kierkegaard’s use of polyvocal pseudonymity—the creation of multiple different authorial personae—in light of similar literary projects undertaken at roughly the same time by J. L. Heiberg and Robert Schumann. I argue that, despite the historical connections between Heiberg and Kierkegaard and their shared city and culture, Kierkegaardian polyvocality is better understood as akin to Schumann’s polyvocal pseudonymous music criticism. While Heiberg employs pseudonymity largely to instantiate distance between reader and author, Schumann’s pseudonymity appears as a response to the inability of language to describe or present music. Despite the authorial distance evident in parts of the Kierkegaardian authorship, I argue that Schumann’s understanding and use of polyvocal pseudonymity are a much better fit with Kierkegaard’s usage—and offer readers a literary entry point into discussions of both music and faith.

In an era of religious tumult, Thoreau was an original voice in American religion. He sought to divorce the religious sentiment from its institutional context and helped pioneer an eclectic, experiential and non-institutional spirituality that has taken on new popularity. His religiosity and iconoclastic theological vision have been obscured, however, by his harsh attacks on churches as well as his pluralism, nature mysticism and refusal to systemize his religious beliefs. Nevertheless, Thoreau was religious to the bone and had a profound sense of the holy. While not a confirmed theist, he was open to and sought union with a divine mystery that was at once immanent in nature and not contained by it. Thoreau called this illimitable presence many names, but he often called it God. His religious sensibility was a central thread in his work as a naturalist, his philosophical thought and his ethical commitments. 

George MacDonald constantly engages with the theme of motherhood. The topic appears in the theology of his sermons, literary criticism, fantasy tales, stories for children, and novels for adults. For MacDonald, motherhood is not inherently connected with pregnancy or giving birth, a perspective that was shaped by his experience of losing his mother at a young age but being loved as a child by his spinster aunt and stepmother. Motherhood, with its primary characteristic of love, belongs to all women. The more a woman increases in love and in the quality of her motherhood, the less she will care whether the children she mothers are her own or another’s. This paper argues that even as he develops an ideal of feminine motherhood, MacDonald affirms a primarily non-normative maternal role when he claims that a childless woman can be more truly a mother than a woman who has borne children.