Cultivating Belief

This book explores how a group of Victorian literary writers - including George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Matthew Arnold - became interested in the emerging anthropology of religion, which sought to explain religion not in terms of doctrines or beliefs but as a function of race or ethnicity.

This book explores how a group of Victorian liberal writers that included George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Matthew Arnold became attracted to new theories of religion as a function of race and ethnicity. Since the early modern period, British liberals had typically constructed religion as a zone of personal belief that defined modern individuality and interiority. During the 1860s, however, Eliot, Arnold, and other literary liberals began to claim that religion could actually do the most for the modern self when it came as a kind of involuntary inheritance. Stimulated by the emerging science of anthropology, they imagined that religious experiences embedded in race or ethnicity could render the self heterogeneous, while the individual who insisted upon selecting his or her own beliefs would become narrow and parochial.

By rethinking the grounds of religion, this book argues, these writers were ultimately trying to shift liberal individualism away from a classical Protestant liberalism that celebrated interiority and agency and toward one that valorized eclecticism and the capacity to keep multiple values in play. More broadly, their work offers us a new picture of secularization, not as a process of religious decline, but as the reinscription of religion as an ordinary feature of human life-like art, or politics, or sex-whose function could be debated.

In his lucid and compelling monograph, Lecourt shows how Victorian studies will profit by a clearer understanding of modern belief. He follows Taylor and the anthropologists Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood to a more nuanced depiction of the 'competing Victorian secularities' that have helped to create the contemporary default intellectual positions . . . Cultivating Belief is thus good to think with, as well as a delight to read a timely and important contribution to thinking on 19th century culture.

Auteur
Sebastian Lecourt received his Ph.D. from Yale University and is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston. His work focuses on Victorian literature and questions of secularization, colonialism, and world literature. His essays have also appeared in PMLA, Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Literature Compass, and he has held fellowships at the Johns Hopkins University, Rutgers University, and Universität Konstanz. He is working on a new book project entitled The Genres of Comparative Religion, 1783-1947.

Contenu

• Introduction: Victorian Anthropology and Victorian Secularity

• 1: The Rubicon of Language: Max Müller, Evangelical Anthropology, and the History of True Religion

• 2: Arnoldian Secularism: Race and Political Theology from Celtic Literature to Literature and Dogma

• 3: History's Second-Hand Bookshop: Self-Cultivation and Scripturality in Daniel Deronda and The Spanish Gypsy

• 4: A More Liberal Surrender: Aestheticism, Asceticism, and Walter Pater's Erotics of Conversion

• 5: National Supernaturalism: Andrew Lang, World Literature, and the Limits of Eclecticism

• Coda: Aesthetic Secularism