English Congregational Hymns in the Eighteenth Century
English Congregational Hymns in the Eighteenth Century

Author: Madeleine Forrell Marshall

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-12-14

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 0813194253

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Historians of the English congregational hymn, focusing on its literary or theological aspects, have usually found the genre out of step with the rationalist era that produced it. This book takes a more balanced approach to the work of four writers and concludes that only eighteenth-century Britain, with its understanding of public verse, common truth, and the utility of poetry, could have invented the English hymn as we know it. The early hymns sought to inspire, teach, stir, and entertain congregations. The essential purpose shifted slightly in line with each poet's setting and in accord with the poetic thought of his day. For Isaac Watts's Independents, powerful traditional imagery was appropriate. Charles Wesley's enthusiasm proceeded from and served the spirit of the revival. John Newton's prophetic vision particularly suited the impoverished community at Olney. William Cowper's masterful handling of formal conventions and his idiosyncratic personal hymns reflect his poetic, rather than clerical, vocation. Despite such temporal variations, the great poetry by each man displays themes of general Christian relevance, suggesting common experience, showing normative features of the genre, and bearing a complex and intriguing relationship to secular literature.

English Hymns of the Nineteenth Century
English Hymns of the Nineteenth Century

Author: Richard Arnold

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780820469423

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English Hymns of the Nineteenth Century brings together for the first time the most popular and widely used English hymns from that period, continuing the work of its foregoing volume, English Hymns of the Eighteenth Century, the genre's formative period. This annotated and edited collection of nearly 200 hymns (with author introductions and a general historical introduction) will be of inestimable value to scholars, students, and laypersons from several disciplines and interests: from hymnology to church and social history and theology, from political science to literature to popular culture. Hymns were the most widely read and memorized verbal structures from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - and in the nineteenth century the hymn became not only the property of dissenters, but also of representatives from the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church. This anthology, therefore, provides unique and highly significant insights into the culture, beliefs, and habits of thought of a people and their spiritual leaders.

A General Introduction to Hymnody and Congregational Song
A General Introduction to Hymnody and Congregational Song

Author: Samuel J. Rogal

Publisher: Scarecrow Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 9780810824164

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Emphasizes the English hymn as a literary entity within denominational and historical contexts. The author sets forth a number of definitions for hymnody and congregational song, and then examines the development of the various forms in England and the United States. With a listing of works for further reading, an index to all hymns discussed, and chronology. ...valuable both for the historical information it provides and for its appreciative evaluation of the religious treasures enshrined in English-language hymns. --ADRIS NEWSLETTER

The Sung Theology of the English Particular Baptist Revival
The Sung Theology of the English Particular Baptist Revival

Author: Joseph V. Carmichael

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2020-12-21

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1725270846

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Anne Steele (1717–1778) originally wrote her hymns to be sung in the Baptist congregation pastored by her father. The foremost female contemporary of hymn-writing giants Charles Wesley, John Newton, and William Cowper, her hymns are infused with spiritual sensitivity, theological depth, and raw emotion. She eventually published her hymns under the pseudonym, Theodosia, which means “God’s Gift.” She believed God had given her a gift to share. Steele’s work was warmly received in her own day. Pastor and publishing pioneer of the modern English hymnal, John Rippon, included more than fifty of her hymns in the various topical sections of his wildly successful Selection of Hymns. Rippon’s hymnal was popular on both sides of the Atlantic, but was especially influential during the nineteenth-century revival and renewal of English Particular Baptists. This book introduces Steele’s hymns in the context of her life and times and of Rippon’s hymnal. It illustrates that Steele’s approach to hymn-writing is a model of biblical spirituality. Each hymn as printed in Rippon’s hymnal, and thus sung by congregations and used as devotional literature, is considered. The sung theology of these congregations is a gift to the church universal and worth rediscovering in the twenty-first century.

Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation, and Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century
Women of Letters, Manuscript Circulation, and Print Afterlives in the Eighteenth Century

Author: M. Bigold

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-01-12

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1137033576

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Using unpublished manuscript writings, this book reinterprets material, social, literary, philosophical and religious contexts of women's letter-writing in the long 18th century. It shows how letter-writing functions as a form of literary manuscript exchange and argues for manuscript circulation as a method of engaging with the republic of letters.

Fiddled out of Reason
Fiddled out of Reason

Author: John William Knapp

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-04-11

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1611461618

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Fiddled out of Reason is a study of several poems spanning the life and career of Joseph Addison, who, along with John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Ambrose Philips, Isaac Watts, and many British poets of the turn of the eighteenth century, helped to cultivate a broad new current of nonliturgical "hymnic" verse that became immensely popular across that century, though it has eluded critical notice until now. The texts the book examines—Addison's St. Cecilia's Day odes (1692, 1699), his libretto for the opera Rosamond (1707), and a sequence of five hymnic works in The Spectator (1712)—precede by twenty-five years John Wesley's publication of the first hymnal for use in the Church of England. The book argues that "secular" hymnic works such as Addison's emerged alongside religio-political controversies and anxieties about British national identity, morality, and expressions of "enthusiastic" passions. Church and Tory interests largely rejected hymnic verse, claiming it would only "fiddle" unwitting readers "out of their reason" and reignite the dangerous fervor of Revolution-era Nonconformity and Dissent. As is evident from his poetry, Addison, a moderate Whig, ardently opposed this view, arguing that the hymnic could in fact be a portal to national and individual amelioration. After an introductory chapter exploring period conceptions of hymnic poetry and the highly contested term "hymn" itself, the argument proceeds through three sections to trace the hymnic's upward trajectory through Addison's early, mid-period, and mature verse. The book devotes the lion's share of its attention to the last of these three, which includes the five-poem Spectator sequence (a poem from the sequence, "The Spacious Firmament on High," will be familiar to many readers). Indeed, in addition to offering new readings of hymnic works by Dryden and Pope, Fiddled out of Reason provides the first extended critical treatment of these five important poems. Publication of the book coincides with the 300th anniversary of Addison's death and with the appearance of a new Oxford edition of Addison's nonperiodical writings.

Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century
Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century

Author: James Bryant Reeves

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-07-09

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1108874819

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Although there were no self-avowed British atheists before the 1780s, authors including Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Sarah Fielding, Phebe Gibbes, and William Cowper worried extensively about atheism's dystopian possibilities, and routinely represented atheists as being beyond the pale of human sympathy. Challenging traditional formulations of secularization that equate modernity with unbelief, Reeves reveals how reactions against atheism rather helped sustain various forms of religious belief throughout the Age of Enlightenment. He demonstrates that hostility to unbelief likewise produced various forms of religious ecumenicalism, with authors depicting non-Christian theists from around Britain's emerging empire as sympathetic allies in the fight against irreligion. Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century traces a literary history of atheism in eighteenth-century Britain for the first time, revealing a relationship between atheism and secularization far more fraught than has previously been supposed.

Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry
Eighteenth-Century Women Poets and Their Poetry

Author: Paula R. Backscheider

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2005-12-31

Total Pages: 556

ISBN-13: 9780801881695

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Co-Winner, James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Association This major study offers a broad view of the writing and careers of eighteenth-century women poets, casting new light on the ways in which poetry was read and enjoyed, on changing poetic tastes in British culture, and on the development of many major poetic genres and traditions. Rather than presenting a chronological survey, Paula R. Backscheider explores the forms in which women wrote and the uses to which they put those forms. Considering more than forty women in relation to canonical male writers of the same era, she concludes that women wrote in all of the genres that men did but often adapted, revised, and even created new poetic kinds from traditional forms. Backscheider demonstrates that knowledge of these women's poetry is necessary for an accurate and nuanced literary history. Within chapters on important canonical and popular verse forms, she gives particular attention to such topics as women's use of religious poetry to express candid ideas about patriarchy and rape; the continuing evolution and important role of the supposedly antiquarian genre of the friendship poetry; same-sex desire in elegy by women as well as by men; and the status of Charlotte Smith as a key figure of the long eighteenth century, not only as a Romantic-era poet.