The Maternal Image of God in Victorian Literature Rebecca Styler 1000892999 9781000892994

The Maternal Image of God in Victorian Literature Rebecca Styler – Ebook Instant Download/Delivery ISBN(s): 1000892999,  9781000892994

Product details:

• ISBN 10: 1000892999
• ISBN 13: 9781000892994
• Author: Rebecca

This book is the study of a religious metaphor: the idea of God as a mother, in British and US literature 1850–1915. It uncovers a tradition of writers for whom divine motherhood embodied ideals felt to be missing from the orthodox masculine deity. Elizabeth Gaskell, Josephine Butler, George Macdonald, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Charlotte Perkins Gilman independently reworked their inherited faith to create a new symbol that better met their religious needs, based on ideal Victorian notions of motherhood and ‘Mother Nature’. Divine motherhood signified compassion, universal salvation and a realised gospel of social reform led primarily by women to establish sympathetic community.

Table of contents:

1 The idea of God as a mother in Victorian culture: Sympathy, prophecy, nature

2 Faces of the Madonna in Elizabeth Gaskell’s fiction: Feminist justice and the matriarchal divine

3 George Macdonald’s fairy god mothers: Romantic religion, female vocation and maternalist

4 Josephine Butler, esoteric Christianity and the biblical motherhood of God

5 ‘The Big Good Thing’: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s maternal gospel of optimism, immanence and

6 Charlotte Perkins Gilman and ‘maternal pantheism’: Religion in utopian motherlands 1889–1915

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