Introduction: Confronting the Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century

The introduction begins by situating the new approaches that the volume offers in relation to influential studies that focus on Christ in the Romantic and Victorian eras. It then moves on to outline the structure of the collection and to survey the breath of nineteenth-century approaches to articulating the person, role and place of Christ and the manifestations and echoes of his presence in critical, literary, and artistic spaces. Ludlow concludes by offering some reflection on how imagining the figure of Christ in the long nineteenth century involved unsettling theological, cultural, historical, philosophical, and phenomenological dialogues that continue to reverberate and inform our imaginings today.