Alderson, David. Mansex Fine: Religion, Manliness
and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Manchester and
New York: Manchester University Press, 1998).
Alderson analyzes how certain nineteenth century writers responded
to contemporary debates about gender, religion, and nation. In his treatment
of Kingsley and Alton Locke, he discusses how a particularly Anglo-Saxon
Christian manliness evolved as a reaction to Catholicism and revolution
and became identifiable with British imperial culture. In his later treatment
of Kingsley’s polemics against Newman, Alderson stresses that Kingsley’s
strong antipathy to Catholicism was largely based on what he felt to be
that religion’s effeminacy and asceticism. By implication, Protestantism,
the true British religion, was the epitome of manliness.
Alton
Locke; Manliness;
Imperialism;
Newman;
Religion.
Barker, Charles. "Erotic Martyrdom: Kingsley's Sexuality
beyond Sex," Victorian Studies Vol. 44, No. 3 (Spring 2002): 465-488.
Charles Barker examines Kingsley’s great personal interest in sex and
sexuality as well as the treatment of these topics in his writings. He
stresses that Kingsley sanctified sex and that he fervently believed that
temporal sex without the promise of its continuation in afterlife was anathema.
Barker also rejects the theory that Kingsley’s bitter denunciation of Catholicism
and what he held was Catholics’ confusion over many sexual matters signified
a nascent homophobia. Rather, Kingsley excoriated the celibacy valorized
by Newman as a vilification of flesh-and-blood marriage which Kingsley
considered was a true path to God.
Sexuality;
Catholicism
; Newman
Downes, David Anthony. “Reverend Charles Kingsley:
Prophet of Convulsion,” in The Temper of Victorian Belief: Studies in
the Religious Novels of Pater, Kingsley, and Newman (New York: Twayne,
1972): 48-81.
Downes examines Kingsley’s style, which he terms “plain prophecy”,
and his religious views. He also discusses differences in style and
temper between Kingsley and Newman, arguing that time has effected a “monumental
irony on historical and critical judgment”. He considers Newman to
be a “medieval personalist” whereas Kingsley is a “prophetical modernist”
(81). Hypatia, argues Downes from his lengthy treatment of
the novel, “represents Kingsley’s search for a way of expressing how religious
faith in Christianity happens, and what it means in the most concrete personalist
terms his imagination would conjure. However philosophically vague,
there is an attempt at a kind of phenomenology of faith, what Newman called
‘a grammar of assent.’ The tenability of Christianity as believable
by people encountering their worlds on the most basic human levels is what
Kingsley was striving to examine” (79).
Religion
; Newman
; Hypatia;
History
.
Fasick, Laura. “The Seduction of Celibacy: Threats
to Male Sexual Identity in Charles Kingsley’s Writings,” in Jay Losey and
William D. Brewer (eds.) Mapping Male Sexuality: Nineteenth Century
England ( Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000):
215-232.
Fasick considers the long English tradition that strong sexual interest
in females is injurious to true manliness. However, she argues that a strong
basis for Kingsley’s anti-Catholic writings and his altercation with Newman
was his conviction that Roman Catholic celibacy rather than sexual indulgence
was frequently a source for effeminacy. Kingsley, an ardent advocate of
marriage, was convinced that sexual abstinence took away from man’s masculinity
as well as posed both physical and spiritual dangers. For Kingsley celibacy
was all too often an act of self indulgence rather than one of self denial.
Manliness;
Sexuality
; Celibacy
; Newman
; Catholicism
Hawley, John C., S.J. “Newman
the Novelist,” America Vol. 163, No. 18 (Dec 8, 1990): 455-457.
Hawley contrasts the opinions of Kingsley and
Newman on marriage, sexuality, and celibacy especially as these are presented
in their literary works. "In Loss and Gain and Callista Newman
enshrined celibacy as a prophetic witness to the spiritual life.
Kingsley countered in his seven novels with his enshrinement of marriage
as the highest Christian vocation, and coupled his praise with portrayals
of celibate men and women who were fearful, untrustworthy and effeminate"
(457).
Newman
; Hypatia
; Saint's
Tragedy, The ; Sexuality
; Celibacy
.
Houghton, Walter E. “The Issue Between Kingsley
and Newman,” Theology Today Vol. IV (April 1947): 81-101.
Houghton argues that the fundamental disagreement between Kingsley
and Newman was the elemental dichotomy between Protestant Liberalism and
Christian Orthodoxy. Though in many respects a conservative and a public
enemy of those espousing the liberal cause, in religion Kingsley followed
the liberalism of the likes of Maurice and Carlyle. While we read
such thinkers to understand liberal ideology, argues Houghton, we study
Kingsley to comprehend Protestant Liberalism in its actual practice.
Catholicism
; Newman
Controversy ; Newman,
John Henry ; Religion
; Protestant
Liberalism .
Litvack, Leon B. “Callista, Martyrdom,
and the Early Christian Novel in the Victorian Age,” Nineteenth-Century
Contexts Vol. 17, No. 2 (1993): 159-173.
A primary goal of Hypatia, or, New Foes with an Old Face, according
to Litvack, was to question deeply held Roman Catholic principles and views
of history of such as Newman and Wiseman, authors themselves of martyrological
historical novels Callista (1855) and Fabiola (1854) respectively.
Kingsley throughout Hypatia, written in the early days of his growing
antagonism to Newman, disparages aspects of the Patristic age and especially
the 5th century when Christianity was the state religion. By depicting
the 5th century Church as corrupt and tyrannical, Kingsley was attacking
the contemporary English Roman Catholic Church which was rapidly growing
in influence. “Kingsley enjoins his readers to look to themselves
for justification – not to the past, in which he finds little support for
his faith” (165).
Hypatia;
Catholicism
; Newman
; History
.
Morris, Kevin L. “John Bull and the Scarlet Woman:
Charles Kingsley and Anti-Catholicism in Victorian Literature,” Recusant
History Vol. 23, No. 2 (October 1996): 190-218.
Morris provides a thorough analysis of Kingsley's often virulent anti-Catholicism,
discussing it in the context of other widespread contemporary anti-Catholic
writings and sentiments held by many of the age's prominent intellectuals
and writers. Morris also considers Newman's critique of anti-Catholic "Kingsleyism"
especially as expressed in his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics
in England.
Catholicism
; Newman
.
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