A Queer Chivalry: The Homoerotic Asceticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Victorian Literature and Culture Series)

Rating:
Summary: Hopkins: ascetic or hedonist?
Review: Saville makes the dangerous mistake of taking current fashions and imposing them on the 19th century. Using some current notion of ascetic and applying it to the time of Hopkins is not to use his own sense of ascetic. The further inference that his ascetic behavior merely hides his truly voluptuous homoerotic "true" self is tenuous at best. The mystic has often expresses in ways which connect to us as physical and passionate rather than logical and cool. Trying to transfer it to the courtly tradition flies in the face of his inspiration from Duns Scotus, and more importantly, from his poetic advances which not only invigorate the earliest of our poetic tradition, but thrust forward in his own structures. The author is advised to read his weather observations and all of his other very Victorian naturalist pursuits. Every day is nature's news from God. Cloud patterns, patterns of animal coloring, fireplaces, birds and farmers are not the objects of homoerotic obsession. More scientific than queer (in its older usage) more modern than courtly.

Rating:
Summary: Hopkins: ascetic or hedonist?
Review: Saville makes the dangerous mistake of taking current fashions and imposing them on the 19th century. Using some current notion of ascetic and applying it to the time of Hopkins is not to use his own sense of ascetic. The further inference that his ascetic behavior merely hides his truly voluptuous homoerotic "true" self is tenuous at best. The mystic has often expresses in ways which connect to us as physical and passionate rather than logical and cool. Trying to transfer it to the courtly tradition flies in the face of his inspiration from Duns Scotus, and more importantly, from his poetic advances which not only invigorate the earliest of our poetic tradition, but thrust forward in his own structures. The author is advised to read his weather observations and all of his other very Victorian naturalist pursuits. Every day is nature's news from God. Cloud patterns, patterns of animal coloring, fireplaces, birds and farmers are not the objects of homoerotic obsession. More scientific than queer (in its older usage) more modern than courtly.