Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture

Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture explores the wide range of issues centered round the theme of male spirituality in the 19th century drawing on the disciplines history, cultural studies, art history, and literary criticism. The study focuses on a wide range of issues including ideological and iconographical representations across the major Christian denominations, militarianism and hymnody and male sexuality and homoeroticism. At this time controversial, this study looks beyond the "canon" of acknowledged prescribers of gender identity, focusing on non-conformist figures such as William Booth and Charles Haddon Spurgeon, and also the work of 19th century homosexual writers such as John Addington Symonds. The study also explores relational aspects of gender, examining the work of women writers such as Eliot, Charlotte Yonge, and Charlotte Brontë and their writing on men and masculinity, and at male responses to the figure of the Virgin Mary.