Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century

Elizabeth Ludlow is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Anglia RuskinUniversity, UK. She is the author of Christina Rossetti and the Bible: Waiting withthe Saints (2014) and a number of journal articles. She is currently working on amonograph entitled Prayer and the Body in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writingand a project on nineteenth-century representations of Early Church women.

• 1. Introduction: Confronting the Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century: Elizabeth Ludlow.- 2.  Blake, Enoch and the Emergence of the Apocalyptic Christ: Christopher Rowland.- 3.  “As the Eye is formed”: Seeing as Christ in Blake’s Bartimaeus: Naomi Billingsley.- 4. Fragmented Images of Christ in Romantic Maritime Poetry: Kirsty J. Harris 5.  Milton’s Christ and Passive Power in Melville and Turner: Laura Fox Gill.- 6. “Real visions of real things”: The Light of the World, Incarnation and Popular Culture: Andrew Tate.- 7. Tennyson, Lacan and the Raising of Lazarus: Valerie Purton.- 8. Tractarian Reserve and the Veiled Figure of Christ: Ascension, Mystery, and the Limits of Imagination: Ralph Norman.- 9. The Masculinity of Jesus and the Doctrine of the Real Presence: Carol Engelhardt Herringer.- 10. Considering the Lilies: Christina Rossetti’s Ecological Jesus: Emma Mason.- 11.  Reimaging Personhood Before the Figure of Christ in the Victorian Early Christian Novel: Elizabeth Ludlow.- 12.  “The Sanctity of Our Sex”: Refiguring the Fallen Woman and the Passion of Christ in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854-5): Jo Carruthers.- 13.  “Our Ordinary Lot”: The Cross, the Crutch, and the Theology of Disability in the Novels of Charlotte M. Yonge: Clare Walker Gore.- 14.  The Godlike Nazarene and the People-Christ: The Figure of Christ in the Chartist Imaginary: Mike Sanders.- 15.  “Strauss-sick”? Jesus and the Saints in the Church of the Future: Gareth Atkins.- 16.  Christly Children, Affect, and the Melodramatic Mode in Late-Victorian Fiction: Leanne Waters.- 17.  “Jesus and Pan held sway together”: Christological Resonances in Edmund Gosse’s The Secret of Narcisse: A Romance (1892): Kathy Rees.

“A particular strength of the volume is its determinedly dialogical rather than oppositional approach across its contributions. … This volume is impressive in its inclusion of insights from disability studies, Chartism … and affect theory in its exploration of Christ in the lived religion of its nineteenth-century subjects. By avoiding issues raised by Higher Criticism and the Quest for the historical Jesus … it breaks new ground.”(Alison Jack, Victorian Studies, Vol. 65 (2), 2023)​