Form & Faith in Victorian Poetry & Religion . By Kirstie Blair. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. vi + 258 pp. $110.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Form & Faith in Victorian Poetry & Religion . By Kirstie Blair . Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2012. vi + 258 pp. $110.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesEarly in Form & Faith in Victorian Poetry & Religion , Kirstie Blair asserts, "Victorian poets and their readers shared a vocabulary relating to contemporary religious debates that we have largely lost. And one of the keywords in this vocabulary was 'form'" (5). Throughout the rest of her book, Blair creates a rich context for the importance of form within Victorian Christianity and demonstrates how recognizing its importance enables readers to gain a deeper understanding of the Christian ideas of poets as varied as the Brownings, Tennyson, Rossetti, and Hopkins. With her detailed exploration of Victorian Christianity, Blair is one of a growing number of scholars who have begun to reconsider the Victorian secularization narrative by focusing on the importance of faith rather than the prevalence of doubt. Following in the tradition of works such as Timothy Larsen's Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England (2006), Emma Mason and Mark Knight's Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (2006), F. E. Gray's Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women's Poetry (2010), and Charles LaPorte's Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible (2011), Form & Faith asks its readers to consider the complexities of faith within the Victorian period and to recognize various ways Christianity was represented through forms in architecture, liturgy, and poetry.As she conducts her study, Blair employs the methodology of strategic formalism: a term coined by Caroline Levine in which "detailed close reading [is combined] with the analysis of broader historical relations" (9). Blair begins by immersing the reader in historical as well as literary context as she devotes the first chapter to the Tractarians. Using examples from Tractarian poetry and prose that reveal various controversies regarding forms of worship, Blair effectively demonstrates that the Tractarians' concern for reviving more formal aspects of worship became a touchstone for all Victorian Christians, for "Victorian religious allegiances began to be read in terms of an individual's support for or condemnation of form" (22). In the next two chapters, she strengthens this thesis by exploring reflections on church architecture and liturgy that reveal how ideas about the value of form circulate within these discourses as Victorian Christians question which forms are most appropriate for bringing individuals closer to God. Moving fluidly among these examples, Blair demonstrates that the Tractarian view of form "as a container for feeling, a safeguard or barrier, whose aim was to regulate emotion and to calm it" (8) was influential throughout the Victorian era as writers from various perspectives repeatedly wrestled with it.After providing this detailed context, Blair explores how poets from different Christian traditions respond to these Tractarian ideas: the Brownings representing the dissenters, Tennyson representing the Broad Church, and Rossetti and Hopkins representing the Anglo-Catholics/Catholics. Her chapter on the Brownings is the most successful. While Blair focuses primarily on Christmas-Eve and Aurora Leigh to demonstrate the connection between the Brownings' dissenting views of Christianity and their tendency to "emphasize forms as dynamic, potentially unstable, on the verge of splitting open" (123), she places her close reading of these poems within the context of letters and other poems that not only illustrates how embedded the Brownings were within these religious discussions but also reveals how interpretations of other poems like "The Bishop Orders His Tomb" become much richer within this context. …