Confessing the Flesh Reading Hopkins in Context

<B>A new theoretical reading of the renowned poet and Jesuit priest</B><BR/><BR/><I>Confessing the Flesh</I> 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, <I>Confessing the Flesh</I> offers new insights on the perennial question of Hopkins’s religious commitments. And with its examination of everything from theological treatises to <I>Punch</I> cartoons, Higgins’s exploration of Hopkins’s confessional modes uncovers the ways that gender and nation become implicated in confessional controversies and fleshly entanglements.