Confessing the Flesh
Lesley Higgins
Year of Publication: 2025
Confessing the Flesh聽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,聽Confessing the Flesh聽offers new insights on the perennial question of Hopkins's religious commitments. And with its examination of everything from theological treatises to聽Punch聽cartoons, Higgins's exploration of Hopkins's confessional modes uncovers the ways that gender and nation become implicated in confessional controversies and fleshly entanglements.