Confessing the Flesh
Reading Hopkins in Context
Lesley Higgins
A new theoretical reading of the renowned poet and Jesuit priest
Confessing the Flesh is an expansive, interdisciplinary analysis of how aesthetic and religious discourses function in dialogue in the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the celebrated Victorian-era poet and Catholic priest. Through Hopkins, Lesley Higgins reveals how religion was expressed, lived, and debated in the nineteenth century. Both a comprehensive analysis of innovative Victorian poetry and a cultural history of confession, this book builds on previous Hopkins criticism by adopting a new approach informed by feminist and Foucauldian theory. With its analysis of the cultural conditions and power relations that sustained religious belief and poetic expression in the Victorian age, Confessing the Flesh offers new insights on the perennial question of Hopkins’s religious commitments. And with its examination of everything from theological treatises to Punch cartoons, Higgins’s exploration of Hopkins’s confessional modes uncovers the ways that gender and nation become implicated in confessional controversies and fleshly entanglements.
An outstanding contribution to Hopkins scholarship and nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies, this book is a delight to read. Challenging scholarly precedent, Higgins refuses to foreground Hopkins’s exceptionalism. Instead, she both decenters him, using him as a prism through which to explore various facets of Victorian life and culture, and—without diminishing Hopkins’s distinctiveness—explores him as a product of his discursive moment.- Julia F. Saville, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, author of Victorian Soul-Talk: Poetry, Democracy, and the Body Politic
Original, substantial, and vigorously argued, Confessing the Flesh provides an expertly informed view of the religious and aesthetic milieu that shaped Hopkins and to which his writing responds. It is replete with beautifully nuanced readings of Hopkins’s poetry and prose.- Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck, University of London, author of Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century: Looking Like a Woman
Lesley Higgins is Professor of English at York University in Canada and the author of The Modernist Cult of Ugliness: Aesthetic and Gender Politics.
