Christina Rossetti and the Bible: Waiting with the Saints

Description

Through theologically-engaged close readings of her poetry and devotional prose, this book explores how Christina Rossetti draws on the Bible and encourages her Victorian readers to respond to its radical message of grace. Structured chronologically, each chapter investigates her participation in the formation of Tractarian theology and details how her interpretative strategies changed over the course of her lifetime. Revealing how her encounter with the biblical text is informed by devotional classics, Christina Rossetti and the Bible highlights the influence of Thomas a' Kempis, John Bunyan, George Herbert and John Donne and describes how Rossetti adapted the teaching of the Ancient and Patristic Fathers and medieval mystics. It also considers the interfaces that are established between her devotional poems and the anthology and periodical pieces alongside which they were published throughout the second half of the nineteenth-century.

Elizabeth Ludlow is a lecturer in English at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. She has held teaching fellowships at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and the University of Birmingham, UK.

Christina Rossetti's engagement with Christian theology continues to fascinate literary scholars. Excellent work on this subject has appeared in the last several decades, including Diane D'Amico's superb Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gender, and Time (CH, May'00, 37-4952) and Lynda Palazzo's Christina Rossetti's Feminist Theology (CH, Jan'03, 40-2659), but Ludlow (Anglia Ruskin Univ., UK) proves there is substantially more to be said on this subject. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. -- R. D. Morrison, Morehead State University * CHOICE * By means of scrupulous and admirable research, Ludlow places Rossetti in a long tradition of religious thinkers who seek to make sacred devotion an intimately human practice ... Her book is a goldmine for scholars who seek deep knowledge of Rossetti and the Bible ... Ludlow's remarkable biblical knowledge, for its part, allows her to uncover fresh meaning in both Rossetti's language and her structure. It is a rare pleasure to find criticism that pays such close attention to the matter of words and their arrangement, and even more of a pleasure to see the degree to which that attention pays off. * Times Literary Supplement * A sophisticated, well-read, and theologically attuned account of Rossetti's assimilation of the Bible and devotional writing. -- Jane Stabler * Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 * Ludlow's almost encyclopaedic mastery of the theological and religious intricacies at play, as well as her ability to trace their historical development and their connections to literature, set the book apart from other studies of its kind: not merely providing a contextual framework for understanding the theological basis of Rossetti's own works, this study illuminates the longer traditions which are themselves at the root of Victorian theological debates, and of the literature shaped by these in turn ... this project offers a necessary correction to recent trends in scholarship that represent Rossetti's approach as 'startlingly modern' ... her project's significance as a contribution to the study of Rossetti's writing and its theological contexts becomes apparent through the many excellent close readings and analyses performed in this book. -- Heather McAlpine, University of the Fraser Valley * Journal of Victorian Culture *