Lesley Higgins – författare

The first of eight volumes of Hopkins's Collected Works to be published, Oxford Essays and Notes presents a remarkable cache of previously unpublished papers, including forty-five essays which Hopkins produced during his undergraduate career at Oxford (1863-1867), only seven of which were reproduced in the 1959 edition of Journals and Papers. Topics range from Platonic philosophy to theories of the imagination, from ancient history to then-contemporary politics and voting rights. Also included are notes from a commonplace book, a remarkable 'dialogue' about aesthetics (featuring a fictionalized John Ruskin figure), and the lecture notes Hopkins prepared in the winter of 1868 while teaching at John Henry Newman's Oratory School in Birmingham-writings in which he explores, for the first time, the theories of inscape and instress so central to his poetic practice. The edition is fully annotated and provides a detailed introduction that situates historically Hopkins's academic and creative efforts.The twelve notebooks represent Hopkins's intellectual and aesthetic development while studying with some of the greatest scholars of the era (Benjamin Jowett, Walter Pater, and T. H. Green), as well as the ethical and spiritual anxieties he wrestled with while deciding to convert to Catholicism (John Henry Newman received him into the Church in 1866). Hopkins never wrote to please his tutors or the university professors-he wrote vividly and searchingly in response to the challenges they presented. Whether evaluating Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, the role of 'neutral' England in the American civil war, or the comparative merits of classical sculpture, his first instinct was always to frame the difficult questions involved and work towards a 'counter' argument.

This volume, the latest in Oxford's edititon of The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, presents Hopkins at his most private and self-considering: there are mundane memoranda about neckties to purchase or letters to write, but also exacting revisions of poems. There are entries of quiet rapture, his attention caught by the unexpected sight of a bluebell or 'some delicate flying shafted ashes ... between which the sun sent straight bright slenderish panes of silver sunbeams down the slant towards the eye'. Paintings, sculptures, and works of literature are stringently assessed, his aesthetic principles freely exercised. There are also nightmares relived; undergraduate 'sins' unsparingly recorded; 'signs' of heavenly mercy carefully noted; small acts of 'kindness' from others, both unexpected and restorative, gratefully acknowledged. Like most diarists, Hopkins was committed to life-writing practices not simply to itemize his daily activities, but to explore the possibilities of textual 'selving'. The space of the page was the opportunity, incitement, and necessity of reporting what had been seen, what had been felt, what had been feared, in order both to memorialize the experiences and to make possible subsequent re-readings. Thus, the diaries and notebooks are a summary of the present and an investment in--even a prediction of--future responses. The entries extend from September 1863, during his second term at Oxford, until February 1875, while studying theology as a Jesuit in his beloved Wales, and from February 1884 until July 1885, while Hopkins was living at a 'third remove' in Dublin, Ireland as a Classics Professor at University College and Fellow of the Royal University of Ireland.

A new theoretical reading of the renowned poet and Jesuit priestConfessing the Flesh 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, Confessing the Flesh offers new insights on the perennial question of Hopkins’s religious commitments. And with its examination of everything from theological treatises to Punch cartoons, Higgins’s exploration of Hopkins’s confessional modes uncovers the ways that gender and nation become implicated in confessional controversies and fleshly entanglements.

A new theoretical reading of the renowned poet and Jesuit priestConfessing the Flesh 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, Confessing the Flesh offers new insights on the perennial question of Hopkins’s religious commitments. And with its examination of everything from theological treatises to Punch cartoons, Higgins’s exploration of Hopkins’s confessional modes uncovers the ways that gender and nation become implicated in confessional controversies and fleshly entanglements.