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Review Essay “A Gesture of Non Serviam”: Victorian and Twentieth-Century Writers in Revolt

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Review Essay “A Gesture of Non Serviam”: Victorian and Twentieth-Century Writers in Revolt RELIGION and the ARTS Religion and the Arts 15 (2011) 369–378 brill.nl/rart Review Essay “A Gesture of Non Serviam”: Victorian and Twentieth-Century Writers in Revolt Marion Spies University of Wuppertal, Germany Glyer, Diana Pavlac. The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tol- kien as Writers in Community. Kent OH: Kent State University Press, 2007. Pp. xx + 294. $45.00 cloth. Gottfried, Roy. Joyce’s Misbelief. Florida James Joyce Series, ed. Sebastian D. G. Knowles. Gainesville FL: University Press of Florida, 2008. Pp. x + 143. $59.95 cloth. Hart, Rev. Trevor, and Ivan Khovacs, eds. Tree of Tales: Tolkien, Literature, and Theology. Waco TX: Baylor University Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 132. $24.95 paper. Manson, Cynthia DeMarcus. The Fairy-Tale Literature of Charles Dickens, Christina Rossetti, and George MacDonald: Antidotes to the Victorian Spiri- tual Crisis. Lewiston NY and Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. Pp. vi + 148 + 2 illustrations. $99.95 cloth. Moran, Maureen. Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature. Vol. 49 of Liverpool English Texts and Studies. Chicago and Liverpool: University of Chicago Press for Liverpool University Press, 2007. Pp. viii + 324. $85.00 cloth. Nolan, Emer. Catholic Emancipations: Irish Fiction from Thomas Moore to James Joyce. Irish Studies Series, ed. James MacKillop. Syracuse NY: Syra- cuse University Press, 2007. Pp. xxiv + 240. $19.95 paper. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156852911X567851 370 M. Spies / Religion and the Arts 15 (2011) 369–378 Ward, Rev. Michael. Planet Narnia. The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xvi + 347. $18.95 paper. * he common denominator of the books under discussion is that they Tare dedicated to mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth-century writers who were at odds with the trends in society, novelists who wrote against the grain and, consequently, found their work often neglected, ridiculed, or misinterpreted by critics. New views on their thought and writing are sorely needed even today. The volumes discussed here offer them and so, not surprisingly, are written against the grain of much contemporary criti- cism as well. On principle, I am of the opinion that Susan M. Griffin’s Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, a favorite of mine, is the final word on the Victorian religious novel. But in Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Lit- erature Maureen Moran comes up with an intriguing new view of a seg- ment of this genre, and for that alone, her book is worth reading. In contrast to earlier research, Moran consistently interprets Victorian sensa- tionalism as a rebellious medium. To prove this, she looks at an incredibly wide range of texts in different genres. (The reader should not be fooled by her mock-modest chapter headlines, which suggest that she only focuses on three poets and about half a dozen familiar novels, e.g., George Eliot’s Romola, Benjamin Disraeli’s Lothair, and Mary Ward’s Helbeck of Bannis- dale; texts and authors that have already received a lot of—even too much—attention. Moran analyzes many more works from the 1850s to the 1890s.) Her aim is to reveal that “through sensationalism, the well- known plots, characters and motifs of Catholicism are rewritten by Victo- rians to explore gender, the body, artistic values, the workings of the mind and feelings” (3). She starts out to do this by scrutinizing lurid portrayals of the Jesuit order. She shows that the figure of the vicious Jesuit—so com- mon in the Victorian age—is often used as a cultural metaphor that brings hidden inconsistencies in the idealized British character into the open, thereby deconstructing the myth of English liberal identity and communal ideals, such as national progress and freedom, respect for individual rights, and acceptance of responsibility (31). She makes this particularly obvious when she unmasks British imperialism in Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! .
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