| FT-52525-04 | Research Programs: Summer Stipends | Maria LaMonaca Wisdom | Catholicism and the Victorian Woman Writer, 1830-70 | 6/1/2004 - 8/31/2004 | $5,000.00 | Maria | LaMonaca | Wisdom | | | | Columbia College, South Carolina | Columbia | SC | 29203-5949 | USA | 2004 | British Literature | Summer Stipends | Research Programs | 5000 | 0 | 5000 | 0 |
This study explores how Victorian women writers of all denominations appropriated elements and images of Catholicism to explore tensions inherent in a Victorian domestic idyll fundamentally shaped by Protestantism. In particular, women writers appropriated Catholicism as a medium through which to articulate anxieties about the secularization and materialism of the domestic sphere, a realm which Protestant ideology posited as a sacred, transcendent space. The extent of this preoccupation with both Catholicism and "secular domesticity" is revealed by a range of canonical texts and former bestsellers, including works by Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Charlotte Yonge, Lady Georgiana Fullerton, and Elizabeth Missing Sewell. |