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Walsingham and the English Imagination
Contributor(s): Waller, Gary (Author)
ISBN: 1409405095     ISBN-13: 9781409405092
Publisher: Routledge
OUR PRICE:   $161.50  
Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats
Published: May 2011
Qty:
Additional Information
BISAC Categories:
- Religion | Sexuality & Gender Studies
- Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
- Art | Subjects & Themes - Religious
Dewey: 820.938
LCCN: 2010048251
Physical Information: 0.63" H x 6.14" W x 9.21" (1.16 lbs) 250 pages
Themes:
- Cultural Region - British Isles
 
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc.
Publisher Description:
Drawing on history, art history, literary criticism and theory, gender studies, theology and psychoanalysis, this interdisciplinary study analyzes the cultural significance of the Shrine of our Lady of Walsingham, medieval England's most significant pilgrimage site devoted to the Virgin Mary, which was revived in the twentieth century, and in 2006 voted Britain's favorite religious site. Covering Walsingham's origins, destruction, and transformations from the Middle Ages to the present, Gary Waller pursues his investigation not through a standard history but by analyzing the invented traditions and varied re-creations of Walsingham by the English imagination- poems, fiction, songs, ballads, musical compositions and folk legends, solemn devotional writings and hostile satire which Walsingham has inspired, by Protestants, Catholics, and religious skeptics alike. They include, in early modern England, Erasmus, Ralegh, Sidney, and Shakespeare; then, during Walsingham's long protestantization from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, ballad revivals, archeological investigations, and writings by Agnes Strickland, Edmund Waterton, and Hopkins; and in the modern period, writers like Eliot, Charles Williams, Robert Lowell, and A.N. Wilson. The concluding chapter uses contemporary feminist theology to view Walsingham not just as a symbol of nostalgia but a place inviting spiritual change through its potential sexual and gender transformation.