{"product_id":"9780813940786","title":"Willful Submission: Sado-Erotics and Heavenly Marriage in Victorian Religious Poetry","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVictorian England: a Jesuit priest writes of wrestling with God at night, limbs entangled; an Anglican sister begs Jesus, her divine lover, to end her aching anticipation of their union; a clergyman exhorts nuns to study the example of medieval women who suffered on the rack in order to become \"brides\" of Christ. Alongside the march of nineteenth-century progress ran a seemingly paradoxical fascination with a dark, erotically suggestive side of religious devotion: the figuration of the Christian God as a heavenly bridegroom who doles out punishment to his bride, the individual soul.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThrough innovative case studies of Victorian religious poetry, Amanda Paxton reveals that while the punitive model proved a convenient rhetorical tool with which to deflate burgeoning nineteenth-century campaigns for women’s rights and challenges to Church authority, in the hands of several writers it also provided a means of resisting patriarchal institutions and interrogating distinctions between science and religion.  \u003ci\u003eWillful Submission\u003c\/i\u003e is the first full-length volume to examine the interplay of sex, suffering, and religion as a touchstone in Victorian culture and verse.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Virginia Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47107394404592,"sku":"9780813940786","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780813940786_p0.jpg?v=1763745430","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780813940786","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}