The Progress of Pilgrimage: Site, Route, and Spirit in Nineteenth-Century Britain
View/ Open
WHITE-DISSERTATION-2019.pdf (8.487Mb)
Access Status
Full text of the requested work is not available in DASH at this time ("restricted access"). For more information on restricted deposits, see our FAQ.Author
White, Elizabeth Porterfield
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
White, Elizabeth Porterfield. 2019. The Progress of Pilgrimage: Site, Route, and Spirit in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.Abstract
Although Britain became an increasingly secular society during the nineteenth century, some of its most popular literary texts engaged a practice with traditional roots in religion: pilgrimage. Three texts in particular—The Pilgrim’s Progress, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and Sartor Resartus—are the foci of this study, which examines their redefinitions of pilgrimage as well as nineteenth-century reader response. John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (ch. 1) detached traditional religious pilgrimage from site-specific routes in the real world through allegorical strategies and otherworldly spaces. After this detachment helped clear the map of set shrines, Byron’s blockbuster Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (ch. 2), crystallizing secular trends for travel, coalesced new categories of pilgrimage sites. In Sartor Resartus (ch. 3), Thomas Carlyle showed how Childe Harold’s form of pilgrimage could be incorporated into a life story as a distinct stage and plot component. Analyzing these texts together, this dissertation suggests that during the nineteenth century, pilgrimage in literature increasingly shifted towards the episodic as it shifted towards the secular, even while the religious metaphor equating life with pilgrimage remained available to readers. The project’s final chapter explores the tensions between the secular and the religious, the life-long and the episodic, through William Blake, whose revival in the 1860s demonstrated the ascendance of secular pilgrimage within the British nation.Terms of Use
This article is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of-use#LAACitable link to this page
http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42013146
Collections
- FAS Theses and Dissertations [5858]
Contact administrator regarding this item (to report mistakes or request changes)