This unique, interdisciplinary and timely volume offers the first major reassessment of Keble's work for several decades, and a comprehensive introduction to this key figure. 'John Keble in Context' provides a wide range of perspectives on Keble's place in politics and religion, his writings and his influence on his literary heirs and successors.

The Spirit of the Oxford Movement brings together some of Owen Chadwick's most important and characteristic essays on the Tractarian Movement and the Church of England in the Victorian era. Along with studies of Newman, Liddon, Edward King and Henri Bremond are included more general essays surveying the reaction of the Established Church and on the nature of Catholicism. In particular the revision of the long-unobtainable analysis of 'The Mind of the Oxford Movement' illustrates once again the profound contribution Owen Chadwick has made to our understanding of religion in Britain in the nineteenth century.

How is Kenneth Starr's extraordinary term as independent counsel to be understood? Was he a partisan warrior out to get the Clintons, or a saviour of the Republic? An unstoppable menace, an unethical lawyer, or a sex-obsessed Puritan striving to enforce a right-wing social morality? This volume is designed to offer an evaluation and critique of Starr's tenure as independent counsel. Relying on lengthy, revealing interviews with Starr and many other players in Clinton-era Washington, Washington Post journalist Benjamin Wittes arrives at an understanding of Starr and the part he played in one of American history's most enthralling public sagas. Wittes offers a portrait of a decent man who fundamentally misconstrued his function under the independent counsel law. Starr took his task to be ferreting out and reporting the truth about official misconduct, a well-intentioned but nevertheless misguided distortion of the law, Wittes argues. At key moments throughout Starr's probe - from the decision to reinvestigate the death of Vincent Foster, to the repeated prosecutions of Susan McDougal and Webster Hubbell to the failure to secure Monica Lewinsky's testimony quickly - the prosecutor avoided the most sensible prosecutorial course, fearing that it would compromise the larger search for truth. This approach not only delayed investigations enormously, but it gave Starr the appearance of partisan zealotry and an almost maniacal determination to prosecute the president. Wittes provides in this account of Starr's term a reinterpretation of the man, his performance, and the controversial events that surrounded the impeachment of President Clinton.

Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart is a significant and timely study of nineteenth-century poetry and poetics. It considers why and how the heart became a vital image in Victorian poetry, and argues that the intense focus on heart imagery in many major Victorian poems highlights anxieties in this period about the ability of poetry to act upon its readers. In the course of the nineteenth century, this study argues, increased doubt about the validity of feeling led to the depiction of the literary heart as alienated, distant, outside the control of mind and will. This coincided with a notable rise in medical literature specifically concerned with the pathological heart, and with the development of new techniques and instruments of investigation such as the stethoscope. As poets feared for the health of their own hearts, their poetry embodies concerns about a widespread culture of heartsickness in both form and content. In addition, concerns about the heart's status and actions reflect upon questions of religious faith and doubt, and feed into issues of gender and nationalism. This book argues that it is vital to understand how this wider culture of the heart informed poetry and was in turn influenced by poetic constructs. Individual chapters on Barrett Browning, Arnold, and Tennyson explore the vital presence of the heart in major works by these poets - including Aurora Leigh, 'Empedocles on Etna', In Memoriam, and Maud - while the wide-ranging opening chapters present an argument for the mutual influence of poetry and physiology in the period and trace the development of new theories of rhythm as organic and affective.

Well over a century and a half after its high point, the Oxford Movement continues to stand out as a powerful example of religion in action. Led by four young Oxford dons--John Henry Newman, John Keble, Richard Hurrell Froude, and Edward Pusey--this renewal movement within the Church of England was a central event in the political, religious, and social life of the early Victorian era. This book offers an up-to-date and highly accessible overview of the Oxford Movement. Beginning formally in 1833 with John Keble's famous "National Apostasy" sermon and lasting until 1845, when Newman made his celebrated conversion to Roman Catholicism, the Oxford Movement posed deep and far-reaching questions about the relationship between Church and State, the Catholic heritage of the Church of England, and the Church's social responsibility, especially in the new industrial society. The four scholar-priests, who came to be known as the Tractarians (in reference to their publication of Tracts for the Times), courted controversy as they attacked the State for its insidious incursions onto sacred Church ground and summoned the clergy to be a thorn in the side of the government. C. Brad Faught approaches the movement thematically, highlighting five key areas in which the movement affected English society more broadly--politics, religion and theology, friendship, society, and missions. The advantage of this thematic approach is that it illuminates the frequently overlooked wider political, social, and cultural impact of the movement. The questions raised by the Tractarians remain as relevant today as they were then. Their most fundamental question--"What is the place of the Church in the modern world?"--still remains unanswered.