Search results
This book is a comparative study of the French and English Catholic literary revivals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These parallel but mostly independent movements include writers such as Charles Péguy, Paul Claudel, J. K. Huysmans, Gerard Manley Hopkins, G. K. Chesterton and Lionel Johnson. Rejecting critical approaches that tend to treat Catholic writings as exotic marginalia, this book makes extensive use of secularisation theory to confront these Catholic writings with the preoccupations of secularism and modernity. It compares individual and societal secularisation in France and England and examines how French and English Catholic writers understood and contested secular mores, ideologies and praxis, in the individual, societal and religious domains. The book also addresses the extent to which some Catholic writers succumbed to the seduction of secular instincts, even paradoxically in themes which are considered to be emblematic of the Catholic literature.
This book explores at length the French and English Catholic literary revivals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These parallel but mostly independent movements include writers such as Charles Péguy, Paul Claudel, J. K. Huysmans, Gerard Manley Hopkins, G. K. Chesterton and Lionel Johnson. Rejecting critical approaches that tend to treat Catholic writings as exotic marginalia, the book makes extensive use of secularisation theory to confront these Catholic writings with the preoccupations of secularism and modernity. It compares individual and societal secularisation in France and England and examines how French and English Catholic writers understood and contested secular mores, ideologies and praxis, in the individual, societal and religious domains. The book also addresses the extent to which some Catholic writers succumbed to the seduction of secular instincts, even paradoxically in themes that are considered to be emblematic of Catholic literature. Its breadth will make it a useful guide for students wishing to become familiar with a wide range of such writings in France and England during this period.
fallenness of language and its grace, as found in poetry of “great pressure”. In this stanza, as throughout Oraclau and also in The Orchards of Syon, glimpses of landscape are glimpsed revelations, in which “The rainbow’s | appearance covenants with reality” (The Orchards of Syon [henceforth OS] XLIX; BH 399): which is to say, the ‘reality’ of grace is a beguiling apparition, an effect of perspective. The covenant is here imagined as a verb, ‘to covenant’: it is an action, an effort, binding the apparent to the real. Gerard Manley Hopkins Hill pays much attention to
. From the series’ first shots we see that one thing carried everywhere by Kavanagh is a copy of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems. Some critics read this as an all-too convenient humanising device for a man whose habits were so destructive of those around him. McGovern, one suspects, would be scornful of such easy criticism of a young working-class man’s higher aspirations. In one of Blandford_JimmyMcGovern.indd 59 28/01/2013 16:08 60 Jimmy McGovern many scenes in which Kavanagh’s imagination is sent into new territory by the high peaks of the Lake District we hear
looking for more flexible formats, as if they were losing faith in the rigid discipline of the more traditional forms. The priest-poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, for instance, identified what he called sprung rhythm as providing the rhythmic basis of his own work. He links it in his ‘Author’s Preface’ with the frequently seen reversals of stress at the beginning of lines in iambic pentameter, and also within the main body of such lines ‘after a strong pause’.2 He says that it is also ‘the rhythm of common speech and of written prose, when rhythm is perceived in them’ (pp
, he feels close to God; in the town, surrounded by buildings and traffic, he struggles to breathe physically and spiritually. For Retté, as for Jammes and Bordeaux, God can be found neither in the noisy city nor in a vision of nature which is at once both romantic and anthropocentric. Only prayer and order can recover the divinely ordered meaning and purpose of the natural environments in which they live. Among English Catholic authors a similar wariness of naturalistic visions of the world is evident. In the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
poetry of Paul Verlaine and of Charles Péguy all represent major contributions to the French literary canon. In England, the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the pamphlets of G. K. Chesterton and the novels of Robert Hugh Benson signify the most important revival in Catholic literary production perhaps since Thomas More and Robert Southwell in the sixteenth century. Such are the importance and scope of these two literary trends that the authors involved have attracted considerable critical interest individually and collectively. France
not neglect the specifically Christian meaning of suffering. As we saw in Chapter 6 , it was a theme already addressed in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ which portrays the death of five Franciscan nuns exiled from the Prussia of Bismarck and the Kulturkampf . The suffering they endure makes them icons of Christ, the suffering saviour: Five! The finding and sake And cipher of suffering Christ. Mark, the mark is of man’s make, And the word of it Sacrificed. 44 In Hopkins’s compact poetic
presence in English society, and, on the other hand, the Ultramontane tendency which had high hopes for the conversion of England. Both tendencies can be seen as tinged by a certain secular pragmatism, and yet in English Catholic writings we often see attempts to step outside the imaginative boundaries which the secular State appears to impose. For a writer like Gerard Manley Hopkins, the project of England’s conversion required spiritual roots in the tradition of Christian suffering which were not nationally coded but universal in character
/ outrage’ (XXIX). Subversive wordplay: ‘Eat whose heart out?’ (XXV), ‘Strophe after strophe / ever more catastrophic. Did I say / strophe? I meant salvo, sorry’ (X), ‘collages of dashed peace’ (XII), ‘I desire so not to deny desire’s / intransigence’ (LV). Vocabularies are mixed in phrases like ‘the contra-Faustian heist’ (I). Rare and dialect words are prominent: ‘swaling Hodder’ (XXXII), ‘dibble-holes’ (LXIX), ‘dwale’ (LXVIII), ‘reddle’ (XXIII), ‘selvage’ (XLIX), and Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘pash’(XLVI), 4 along with heavily Latinate items such as ‘eximious’ (LXIV