Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach’’: A Depiction of Victorian Doubt and Faith

Dissatisfied with his age Arnold turned towards Greek Culture and literature. Victorian age was an age of doubt and faith. Religious faith were in melting pot. Darwin’s ‘Origin Of Species’ (1859) shook the Victorian faith. Darwin questioned the very basic statement of ‘The Holy Bible’. Arnold considered literature as a weapon to established the broken faith of Victorians. He took Greek literature as reference to write literature. Arnold keenly observed Greek art and culture and find solace in it. He used Greek Art and Culture as the tool of morality and it has the healing power to wounded Victorian faith. Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach is a poetry of vanished past and vanished faith. Keywords: Reflective elegy, Vanished Faith, Victorian Doubt and Faith, Sea of faith.

Digital Technology to Preserve Heritage Structures

Heritage masonry structures such as castles, ancient sea walls, breakwaters and lighthouses have existed for centuries but more than ever in this current era need to be preserved and quite often strengthened to be able to survive natural and manmade destructive forces. This chapter uses examples of digital technology to not only strengthen and preserve such structures but by advocating the use of the internet offers archive access to what these structures are, what has caused their deterioration and what has been done to strengthen them for future generations to see. By also using archive research into their construction in a combination with digital models of the structures the examples in this chapter show others how the use of LiDAR, drones and GPR have been able to secretly and sensitively strengthen and preserve these structures. The examples in this chapter range from a Neolithical tomb to castles and breakwaters dating from the middle ages and unique engineering examples from the UK’s Victorian age of engineers. Now that these worked examples of preservation and strengthening have been stored and become available visually through the internet to those interested and working in this field by using such modern digital tools, they are now able to enter a new paradigm of Heritage preservation.

Vagrancy in the Victorian Age

Vagrants were everywhere in Victorian culture. They wandered through novels and newspapers, photographs, poems and periodicals, oil paintings and illustrations. They appeared in a variety of forms in a variety of places: Gypsies and hawkers tramped the country, casual paupers and loafers lingered in the city, and vagabonds and beachcombers roved the colonial frontiers. Uncovering the rich Victorian taxonomy of nineteenth-century vagrancy for the first time, this interdisciplinary study examines how assumptions about class, gender, race and environment shaped a series of distinct vagrant types. At the same time it broaches new ground by demonstrating that rural and urban conceptions of vagrancy were repurposed in colonial contexts. Representational strategies circulated globally as well as locally, and were used to articulate shifting fantasies and anxieties about mobility, poverty and homelessness. These are traced through an extensive corpus of canonical, ephemeral and popular texts as well as a variety of visual forms.

Joseph Addison

Joseph Addison: Tercentenary Essays is a collection of fifteen essays by a team of internationally recognized experts specially commissioned to commemorate in 2019 the three-hundredth anniversary of Addison’s death. Almost exclusively known now as the inventor and main author of The Spectator, probably the most widely read and imitated prose work of the eighteenth century, Addison also produced important and influential work across a broad gamut of other literary modes-poems, verse translations, literary criticism, periodical journalism, drama, opera, travel writing. Much of this work is little known nowadays even in specialist academic circles; Addison is often described as the most neglected of the eighteenth century’s major writers. Joseph Addison: Tercentenary Essays sets out to redress that neglect; it is the first essay collection ever published which addresses the full range and variety of his career and writings. Its fifteen chapters fall into three groupings: an initial group of five dealing with Addison’s work in modes other than the literary periodical (poetry, translation, travel writing, drama); a central core of five addressing The Spectator from a variety of disciplinary perspectives (literary-critical, sociological and political, bibliographical); and a final set of five exploring Addison’s reception within several cultural spheres (philosophy, horticulture, art history) by individual writers (Samuel Johnson) or across larger historical periods (the Romantic age, the Victorian age), and in Britain and Europe (especially France). Joseph Addison: Tercentenary Essays provides an overdue and appropriately diverse memorial to one of the eighteenth century’s dominant men of letters.

Introduction

The Introduction situates the fifteen chapters of the volume in the context of the sharp decline in Addison’s cultural and literary reputation since the beginning of the twentieth century, seeking to outline ways in which this collection might help reverse that decline, or at least challenge the ideological prejudices and critical misapprehensions that block a rounded appreciation of Addison and his writings. It is in three sections, each concerned with one of the subgroupings into which the volume’s chapters divide: first, the five chapters which treat Addison’s most definitive works, The Tatler, The Spectator, and Cato; then the four which deal with his works (now largely neglected) in verse and prose before The Spectator; and finally the five which assess his reception and influence in Britain and Europe from the eighteenth century through Romanticism to the Victorian age. This collection of essays, the first ever published on Addison that covers his career as a whole (rather than just the literary periodicals), reminds us of the range and variety of his work and of the correspondingly diverse responses it has occasioned through the ages. In doing so, the Introduction argues, it should help loosen the hold of the narrower conception of Addison as moral exemplar and epitome of bourgeois civility, deriving from partial constructions of The Spectator and Cato, which once underpinned his fame but now drastically imperils it.

Revisiting a Victorian Poet: Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ecocritical and Religious Echoes

The article starts from the claims of some ecocritical theoreticians that Christianity may be considered among the roots of the belief that man masters the earth (at least in the West) and thus justifies the current environmental crisis. But even these critics feel the need to provide role models of environmental concern from the list of saintly figures of the Christian tradition. In an age completely enthusiastic about the union between science and technology, the Victorian Age, the Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote sonnets that may be read through the ecocritical lens at a time when the concept had not been invented. The conclusions of the essay point out the relevance of the emergence of ecococritical studies in the 1980s, showing thus how literary studies, religion and spirituality join environmental concerns and contribute to man’s fair appreciation and treatment of nature.

The strange case of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Robert Stevenson in the Victorian Age: A protest against the depersonalization

In the article, the authors touch upon the problem of moral choice in the works of Dostoevsky and Stevenson. Comparative analysis showed that Dostoevsky's character strives more towards the ideal of all-humanity and to the deeds within the framework of Christian orthodoxy. In “The Double” Golyadkin who was rooted in the tradition of folk perception of the world, tries to preserve his moral look and attempts to reach a new level of self-determination. Stevenson created his own artistic version of the fate of the dual hero. The successful Dr. Henry Jekyll himself gave birth to Mr. Hyde to enjoy the fullness of sinful temptations, but life did not succumb to the presumptuous correction. The moral choice of the heroes of Dostoevsky and Stevenson, due to various reasons, to reach the heights of success and sink to the very bottom, testifies to the futility of claims to spiritual emasculation of a person and depersonalization in the bureaucratic world.

Africanising the Four-self-leadership Formula in the Church of Christ in Zimbabwe

The Church of Christ in Zimbabwe (COCZ) has adopted Western philosophies of Euro-American cultures originating from the Victorian age during the Restoration Movement (RM) of the American Second Great Awakening (SGA). This exclusive, divisive and oppressive culture denied women, the poor, and the young, the opportunity to lead. The RM emphasised going back to the founding charism of the New Testament Church, with Christian unity and ecumenism as central elements. Its doctrines became rigid, denying female leadership, constitutions, central headquarters, and further ministerial formation as worldly. This study raises these aspects as indispensable to the contextualising, inculturating and incarnating framework of the gospel in an African context. This reflection takes account of the four-self-leadership formula, as inspired by Magwidi’s PhD study (2015–2021), as well as other sources like the minutes of church board meetings and contextual writings by COCZ’s local clergy. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews that were collated with written sources and heuristically interpreted by the African Cultural Hermeneutics Approach (ACHA) (Kanyoro 2002; 2001). A synthesis of missionary ideology with African narratives of the Christian faith (using ACHA) interpreted the data to understand the “how” of contextual, cultural and religious transformation in the COCZ. The study recommends new, inclusive and transformative modes of leadership empowerment for an authentic African Church.