Charles Kingsley : faith, flesh, and fantasy / edited by Jonathan Conlin and Jan Marten Ivo Klaver.

The papers presented in this volume mainly emerged from a workshop the editors convened at the Gladstone Library in Hawarden, Flintshire, in July 2017.

Foreword: Amyas and me : a personal history of Charles Kingsley / John Sutherland -- Introduction: Charles Kingsley : "The most typical Victorian of them all" / Jan Marten Ivo Klaver and Jonathan Conlin -- "Love me! Baby! Love God!" : courtship, marriage, and the emergence of a Kingsleyan ascetics, 1839-1845 / Jonathan Conlin -- A "yeasty state of mind" : Charles Kingsley and the problem of self-culture / Richard Salmon -- "To amuse merely as a novel" : Alton Locke (1850) and literary pleasure / Francis O'Gorman -- Effeminate : Kingsley and the history of an epithet / James Eli Adams -- How odd is Kingsley's Hypatia? / Simon Goldhill -- The fly in the amber: the controversy with Newman / Jan Marten Ivo Klaver -- Kingsley's muscular poetics / Herbert F. Tucker -- Kingsley's Old Testament heroes / Gareth Atkins -- Charles Kingsley and the evolution of man and morals in The water-babies / Piers J. Hale -- Evolutionary and Anglican afterlives : death as a sacrament in Kingsley's Water babies / Alan Rauch -- Kingsley on race and empire / Theodore Koditschek -- Kingsley and the Irish Norman Vance -- Histories and historians / Leslie Howsam -- Afterword: Charles Kingsley as polymath / Bernard Lightman.

"Novelist, poet, Anglican priest and controversialist, Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) epitomises the bustling Victorian man of faith and letters, a prolific polymath as ready to break a lance with John Henry Newman over Christian doctrine as he was to preach to schoolchildren on the virtues of manly, physical struggle. Kingsley's The Water-Babies and Westward Ho! were best-sellers which became classics of children's literature. Kingsley has come to epitomize the Victorian age. On closer inspection Kingsley is harder to categorise: a socialist who was also an imperialist, a Chartist revolutionary who was Queen Victoria's favourite novelist, a natural theologian who popularized Darwin, a priest who celebrated sex as sacrament, Kingsley only appears straightforward if you consider him one piece at a time. The debates he shaped remain with us today: faith and sexuality, economics and exploitation, race and identity. The aim of this book is to present the whole man: to consider the public crusades for public health alongside the most private sexual fantasies of sexual intercourse; to consider the ardent imperialist alongside the Darwinist. It will be of interest to all students of Victorian Studies, as well as of British/Imperial History, Church History and especially the History of Science"-- Provided by publisher.

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