| Paganism and Christianity in the Victorian World | ||||||||||||
| Online on WebCt | ||||||||||||
| With ancient traditions and values being besieged by forces of the modern, religion felt this attack as much as any other part of Victorian society. Hence, the emergence of paganism as a counterpoint to Christianity. Not a single formal religion, and thus uncapitalized, paganism represents the increasing emergence of an attitude towards the supernatural and the natural that will be at the center of this course. We’ll define the term rather carefully as the course develops, but as a starting point I’ll just suggest that by paganism I mean attitude towards the gods and religion represented by that culture the Victorians saw as a template for their own, the Roman. In the Roman Empire, no single religious point of view dominated, and thus Rome had no “—ism,” but rather a variety of religious practices. Nonetheless, with the “victory” of Christianity in the years after Constantine’s supposed conversion in AD 312-13, this Christianity thought it saw a collective religious force, and went about destroying it. The core of these various pagan religious practices, however, never went completely away, and came back into the western world during the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and especially the Victorian worlds. | ||||||||||||
| Reading list | ||||||||||||
| 1. The French Lieutenant’s
Woman, by John Fowles 2. Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon. 3. The Genius of John Ruskin, by Rosenberg, ed. 4. Poems and Ballads, by Algernon Swinburne. 5. A Grammar in Aid of Assent, John Henry Newman. 6. An Anthology of Pre-Raphaelite Writings, Hayes, Stryker, eds. 7. Abridgement of the Secret Doctrine, H. Blavatsky. 8. Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy. |
|
|||||||||||