Building upon the evidence that John Henry Newman's Parochial Sermons is a georgic (Lams 2004)
the current book defines and discusses the visionary georgic a subset of the genre whose
exemplars include Lucretius' De rerum natura and Wordsworth's The Prelude. Newman's visionary
georgic defends Christian revelation against the rationalistic subjectivism that tended to
displace religious faith by Wordsworthian self-exploration leading to the Victorian
redefinition of literature as secular scripture. Subjects discussed include Newman's relations
with readers his sermonic rhetoric and his analysis of doctrines celebrated in the Church's
liturgy.
