Since the mid 1990s, interest in the aestheticism of the late 19th century has been reflected in both popular and scholarly venues. Reproductions of the consciously medievalist and mythical designs created by William Morris have become decorative icons; alongside them in the marketplace are copies of paintings by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In both a 2001 conference at St John's College, Cambridge University, and an international exhibition of his works planned for 2003, Dante Gabriel Rossetti has become the focus of considerable attention; his visual and verbal art is much discussed for using both mythical and mystical elements in its Pre-Raphaelite symbolism. Less well known, however, is the rich and detailed imaginative symbolism that Christina Georgina Rossetti, his sister, blended with the didactic strains in her religious prose.
She combined an understanding of how to evoke responses through the use of precisely described sensory detail with the Anglo-Catholic doctrine of Analogy, in which spiritual truths are always described through physical symbols; the logic of the communicated analogies, however, depends on their symbolic context. These four texts should be of value to scholars from several disciplines. Rossetti scholars will find the texts have considerable ability to aid understanding of her poetry. Historians could use these works as representative of some of the social and cultural trends that began to develop in the late 19th century. Theologians will find them a useful aid to studying the development of an unusual branch of theological thought and as a means of studying the type of theological rhetoric that finds expression in a great deal of popular literature today. Though the "Notes On The Commandments" and the "Devotional Commentary On The Apocalypse" may represent a slightly more formal theology and the other two works may be more devotional and less formal, each represents an attempt at interpretation or application of religious beliefs.
Literarily, culturally and theologically, each of these texts has potential as a primary research source.
- ISBN10 1843710757
- ISBN13 9781843710752
- Publish Date 16 October 2003
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 19 September 2015
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Imprint Thoemmes Continuum
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 1560
- Language English