Martin Dubois – författare

Gerard Manley Hopkins was one of the most innovative British poets of the nineteenth century. This book provides an authoritative guide to the ideas and influences shaping Hopkins's life and writing. Consisting of thirty-eight essays by leading scholars, the book covers topics that have long attracted scholarly attention while also responding to recent critical trends. It considers Hopkins's formal innovations alongside his theological and philosophical ideas. Chapters examine his Victorian aesthetic and cultural contexts as well as the significance of his ecological imagination and response to environmental degradation. Hopkins's poetry was not widely known until the 1930s, and the book closes by discussing the distinctive nature of its reception and influence. Informed by original research but accessibly written, the essays enable a fresh engagement with the originality of Hopkins's writing and thought.

This nuanced yet accessible study is the first to examine the range of religious experience imagined in Hopkins's writing. By exploring the shifting way in which Hopkins imagines religious belief in individual history, Martin Dubois contests established views of his poetry as a unified project. Combining detailed close readings with extensive historical research, Dubois argues that the spiritual awareness manifest in Hopkins's poetry is varied and fluctuating, and that this is less a failure of his intellectual system than a sign of the experiential character of much of his poetry's thought. Individual chapters focus on biblical language and prayer, as well as on the spiritual ideal seen in the figures of the soldier and the martyr, and on Hopkins's ideas of death, judgement, heaven and hell. Offering fresh interpretations of the major poems, this volume reveals a more diverse and exploratory poet than has been recognised.