Theses and Dissertations
Issuing Body
Mississippi State University
Advisor
Claggett, Shalyn
Date of Degree
12-11-2009
Document Type
Graduate Thesis - Open Access
Major
English
Degree Name
Master of Arts
College
College of Arts and Sciences
Department
Department of English
Abstract
Many efforts have been made by nineteenth and twentieth-century critics alike to classify Charles Algernon Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads (1866) as blatantly sacrilegious. This evaluative approach, however, fails to account for the thematic significance of Swinburne’s nuanced use of Christian imagery. Through a reading of three representative poems from the collection – “Dolores,” “Anactoria,” and “Laus Veneris” – this thesis demonstrates that Swinburne appropriates the Catholic concepts of transubstantiation, confession, and suffering for a specific aesthetic purpose. In the Catholic tradition, these concepts symbolically represent a unification of ostensibly antithetical states to achieve transcendence. For instance, the doctrine of transubstantiation unites the spiritual acceptance of Christ’s sacrifice through the physical consumption of bread and wine. Far from being, as Robert Buchanan famously claimed, “unclean for the mere sake of uncleanness,” Swinburne strategically appropriated the mechanism of religious transcendence in order to affect a poetic escape from the very moral categories it represented.
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/11668/15498
Recommended Citation
Gillespie, James Daniel, "Swinburne and Catholicism: unifying the flesh and the spirit" (2009). Theses and Dissertations. 4173.
https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/td/4173
Comments
nineteenth-century poetry||unification of body and spirit||Swinburne||Catholicism||body/soul duality