Literary Theology by Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century – By Rebecca Styler

LITERARY THEOLOGY BY WOMEN WRITERS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY . By Rebecca Styler . The Nineteenth Century, 4 . Burlington VT : Ashgate , 2010 . Pp. ix + 180 ; illustrations. $99.95 . This innovative book examines different literary genres utilized by mainly British women writers within Anglican, Methodist, and Unitarian churches to construct Christian theology that more adequately addressed salient issues of ethics, sociopolitical analysis and activism, and gender identity in the latter nineteenth century. Styler explores novels, poetry, biographies, essays, and speeches through which women developed trailblazing theological views about the divine, divine-human relations, sin and salvation, and other topics at the crossroads of inherited Christian traditions and existential human realities. After an introductory chapter that elaborates the sociocultural, intellectual, and historical contexts of nineteenth-century women's theological writings, Styler devotes subsequent chapters to the novels and biographies of E. Worboise that focused on religion, gender, and public life to deprivatize both women and religion; the poetry of A. Brontë that reflected modern debates between rationality, existentialism, and affectivity in (re)articulating claims about God; the collective biographies of biblical women by multiple writers that paralleled twentieth-century feminist hermeneutics; and the religio-political writings of H. Martineau and J. Butler that forged a theological basis for an enlightened, responsible, and politically engaged citizenry and thus presaged, in Styler's balanced (and not at all anachronistic) view, twentieth-century liberation theologies. Resembling contemporary feminist theologians who circumvent exclusion from ecclesiastical structures to do theology, these women wrote as a religious vocation, as an alternative means to shape Christian theological discourse and practice. This book will fit well within graduate-level courses regarding nineteenth-century European theology and literature, comparative theological method, and theology and genre

Anachronism · Art · Christian theology · Existentialism · Feminist theology · Literature · Poetry · Politics · Sociology · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies