Symbol And Sacrament: The Incarnational Aesthetic Of Christina Rossetti

This thesis attempts to establish that Christina Rossetti\u27s particular religious milieu (of which the Oxford Movement was a prominent feature) was a formative influence not only on her religious poetry, but also on the pervasive aesthetic and symbolic practice that unifies the general and devotional sections of her volumes of poetry. Underlying the Oxford Movement (and its emphasis on the Incarnation, its revival of ceremonial in Anglo-Catholic worship, the renewed emphasis on sacrament that it engendered, and the sacramental aesthetic characteristic of Tractarian poetics) is a belief that material creation is able to contain and communicate moral and spiritual meaning. For Rossetti, it is through the Incarnation that the physical world becomes capable of containing moral and spiritual meaning, and it is through an awareness of the Incarnation that Rossetti\u27s characters (and, I will argue, her intended readers) are able to exercise symbolic and spiritual discernment); thus, I have called Rossetti\u27s symbolic method the Incarnational aesthetic. The first two chapters examine the genesis of Rossetti\u27s aesthetic: Chapter One contains an examination of the Tractarian influence, while Chapter Two evaluates the relationship between symbol and sacrament in Rossetti\u27s aesthetic.;In Chapters Three and Four an argument is made for reading Rossetti\u27s poems, first, in the light of the much-neglected devotional prose works, and, second, within the context of the sequence and structure in which she placed them. Chapters Five through Seven contain a close study of the poems of Rossetti\u27s first published volume, Goblin Market and Other Poems, and demonstrate that this volume can be interpreted as a product of Rossetti\u27s Incarnational aesthetic and its premise that symbolic and spiritual meaning can be communicated by the created world. In the final three chapters, the same approach is applied to Rossetti\u27s second volume, The Prince\u27s Progress and Other Poems, a volume which explores the Incarnational aesthetic with an emphasis on the challenge that moral and spiritual interpretation present