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Essays and Reviews is a collection of seven articles
that appeared in 1860, sparking a Victorian culture war that
lasted for at least a decade. With pieces written by such
prominent Oxford and Cambridge intellectuals as Benjamin
Jowett, Mark Pattison, Baden Powell, and Frederick Temple
(later archbishop of Canterbury), the volume engaged the
relations between religious faith and current topics of the
day in education, the classics, theology, science, history,
literature, biblical studies, hermeneutics, philology,
politics, and philosophy. Upon publication, the church, the
university, the press, the government, and the courts, both
ecclesiastical and secular, joined in an intense dispute.
The book signaled an intellectual and religious crisis,
raised influential issues of free speech, and questioned the
authority and control of the Anglican Church in Victorian
society. The collection became a best-seller and led to
three sensational heresy trials.
Although many historians and literary critics have
identified Essays and Reviews as a pivotal text of
high Victorianism, until now it has been almost inaccessible
to modern readers. This first critical edition, edited by
Victor Shea and William Whitla, provides extensive
annotation to map the various positions on the controversies
that the book provoked. The editors place the volume in its
complex social context and supply commentary, background
materials, composition and publishing history, textual
notes, and a broad range of new supporting documents,
including material from the trials, manifestos, satires, and
contemporary illustrations.
Not only does such an annotated critical edition of
Essays and Reviews indicate the impact that the
volume had on Victorian society; it also sheds light on our
own contemporary cultural institutions and
controversies.
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