The Influence of the Oxford Movement on Poetry and Fiction

Abstract

First paragraph: In the twentieth and twenty-first century, the Oxford Movement has received a very substantial amount of attention as a literary movement, not simply a historical or theological phenomenon. It is difficult to study the politics or theology of Tractarianism without taking into account that of the three men most generally associated with it, Keble was primarily famous as a poet rather than for any of his prose works, and Newman had a substantial if not equal reputation for poetry and fiction. More importantly than their own literary productions, the leaders and followers of Tractarianism in its early days placed an extremely high value on literature – the right kind of literature – and never lost sight of its importance as a means of disseminating ideology. Private reading, as Joshua King’s recent study demonstrates, would become a means of imagining ‘participation in a national Christian community’, created and sustained by the circulation of ideas in Victorian print culture (King 2015: 14).