ENG 346: 19th-Century Literature: Victorian

Renowned Hopkins expert Joseph J. Feeney, SJ, offers a fresh take on Gerard Manley Hopkins which shakes our understanding of his poetry and his life and points towards the next phase in Hopkins studies. While affirming the received view of Hopkins as a major poet of nature, religion, and psychology, Feeney finds a pervasive, rarely noticed playfulness by employing both the theory of play and close reading of his texts.

This innovative book brings together fifty-five essays by poets, scholars, novelists, artists, philosophers, theologians, and others who respond to the art and life of Hopkins the poet, teacher, naturalist, healer, and creative force. Hopkins Variations celebrates Hopkins's fame with essays from women and men of thirteen countries on four continents: Australia, Canada, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Scotland, and the United States.

Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life incorporates previously unavailable information to portray the pre- and post-Jesuit years of an English poet whose sensual nature was at odds with his passionate spirituality. Princeton emeritus professor Martin, the only biographer to have unrestricted use of Hopkins' private papers, tells the extraordinary story from Hopkins' early life and studies at Oxford, through his tortuous conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism, to his struggle in later years to retain his very sanity.

Scrutinizing the claim frequently made by critics that literary forms represent forms of consciousness, Eugene Hollahan attempts in Hopkins Against History a double-edged project. He applies popular critical methods - psychoanalytical, New Historical, interdisciplinary, and the like - as procedures in an examination of that rare poetic spirit Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The conventional picture of the young Hopkins as a conservative High-Church ritualist is starkly contested by this study which draws upon his unpublished Oxford essays on philosophy to reveal a boldly speculative intellectual liberal. Less concerned with Christian factionalism than with countering contemporary threats to faith itself, Hopkins' thought is seen to follow that of his teachers Benjamin Jowett and T. H. Green, who turned to Kant and Hegel to vouchsafe the grounds of Christian belief against contemporary scientism.

Although A Reader's Guide to Gerard Manley Hopkins is a small book, it is an encyclopedia of knowledge. There is a brief chronology of the life and interests of Hopkins, followed by guidance through the poems in the form of facts about the composition, manuscript variations, interpretations, paraphrases, and critical disagreements. An enlightening reference section of poetic terms and biographical notes on the poet's friends is followed by a select bibliography and full index.