“Tennyson’s ‘Christian Year’: The Minimum of Faith and National Spiritual Community”

Friday, February 8, 3:30-4:30, Armstrong Browning Library

Dr. Joshua King (Baylor, English) shared the results of his research leave for fall 2012, which he used to work on his book, Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain’s Age of Print.  The book, under serious consideration by Ohio State University Press, shows how 19th C. creative authors, journalists, educators, and clergy treated the circulating printed page as a medium for imagining and partaking in competing versions of a Christian community spanning Britain.  The presentation focused on the seventh chapter, which argues that Tennyson’s elegy In Memoriam quietly relied on recognized public religious and cultural forms to portray faith as a matter of the private soul.  The poem thereby became a quasi-sacred work of national scripture, used by some to encourage a nationalistic and aggressive sense of sacred British community.