Shaping Belief

Nineteenth-century writing possesses a powerful diversity of voices that makes the period as distinctive to us today as it was in the day of Wordsworth, Tolstoy, Dickinson, Chekov, and Poe. The wide variety of ways in which different beliefs and voices could be heard, as well as the equally varying and competing versions of unity that underpinned the period’s belief systems all coalesced to form a tension vital to the writing of the period. In Shaping Belief, a wide range of innovative critical essays, situated within contemporary theoretical debates, explore how the energy of belief came to manifest itself in order to rethink the place of belief in nineteenth-century writing, while providing an important foray into both current thinking on literary studies of this period and contemporary culture as well.