Liverpool University Press Shaping Belief:

The powerful diversity which makes writing of the nineteenth century period so distinctive to us continues to be of importance. The wide variety of ways in which different beliefs and voices could be heard, and equally the many varying and competing versions of unity which underpinned all kinds of belief during the period, coalesced to form a vital tension that was particular to nineteenth-century writing. The forces of an increased religious pluralism, industrialisation, and secularism opened up a dynamically charged space in which ideas of unity might be challenged, fought for, or reconfigured. The ways in which culture, politics, and religion intersected to produce this unique space, in which both the shaping and shapes of belief can be read, is the focus for this collection. In Shaping Belief a wide range of innovative critical essays, situated within contemporary theoretical debates, have been brought together to explore how the energy of belief, that radical residue which flowed out from religion during the nineteenth century, came to manifest itself, evident as much in expressions of newly formed personal relations to ideas of the public or the poet's search for an aesthetics of unity, as in the appropriation and transmission of religious discourse in writing of the period. By re-visioning the place of belief in nineteenth-century writing the collection provides important forays into current thinking, both on the position occupied by belief within nineteenth-century literary studies, and moreover also within contemporary culture itself.