Title: Muscular christianity
First published: 1994
Description: Muscular Christianity was an important religious, literary, and social movement of the mid-nineteenth century. This volume draws on recent developments in culture and gender theory to reveal ideological links between Muscular Christianity and the work of novelists and essayists, including Kingsley, Emerson, Dickens, Hughes, MacDonald, and Pater, and to explore the use of images of hyper-masculinised male bodies to represent social as well as physical ideals. Muscular Christianity argues that the ideologies of the movement were extreme versions of common cultural conceptions, and that anxieties evident in Muscular Christian texts, often manifested through images of the body as a site of socio-political conflict, were pervasive throughout society. Throughout, Muscular Christianity is shown to be at the heart of issues of gender, class, and national identity in the Victorian age.
Subjects: Body, Human, Christian sociology, Christianity, History, Human Body, Masculinity, Protestant churches, Protestantism, Religious aspects, Religious aspects of the Human body, Masculinity in literature, English prose literature, Literature and society, Intellectual life, History and criticism, Sex role in literature, Christianity and literature, Men in literature, Body, Human, in literature, English prose literature, history and criticism, Human body in literature
Places: United States