Publisher's Synopsis
According to popular 19th-century Protestant opinion, Catholicism was an effeminate religion characterized by servility, superstition and an excessive ascetism. By implication, therefore, Protestantism - which defined key features of Britishness - was also an important determinant of notions of manliness. This text interrogates the ideological relations between religion, gender and nation in 19th-century Britain.;In a wide-ranging account which incorporates analyses of writers as diverse as Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Kingsley, J.H. Newman, Hopkins and Wilde, this text provides an account of the ways in which manliness came to be defined against both Catholicism and revolution, fed more generally into British imperial culture, and, in particular, became integral to colonial perceptions of Ireland. The tensions between manliness and male same-sex desire in this context are also a persistent theme of the book.
