“This volume not only brings together an impressive collection of internationally renowned scholars but also offers ambitious and far-reaching conclusions that reassess what ‘religion’ meant in the nineteenth century.” —Jo Carruthers
Bringing together scholars from literary, historical, and religious studies, Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion interrogates the seemingly obvious category of “religion.” This collection argues that any application of religion engages in complex and relatively modern historical processes. In considering the various ways that nineteenth-century religion was constructed, commodified, and practiced, contributors to this volume “speak” to each other, finding interdisciplinary links and resonances across a range of texts and contexts.
The participle in its title—Constructing—acknowledges that any articulation of nineteenth-century religion is never just a work of the past: scholars also actively construct religion as their disciplinary assumptions (and indeed personal and lived investments) shape their research and findings. Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion newly analyzes the diverse ways in which religion was debated and deployed in a wide range of nineteenth-century texts and contexts. While focusing primarily on nineteenth-century Britain, the collection also contributes to the increasingly transnational and transcultural outlook of postsecular studies, drawing connections between Britain and the United States, continental Europe, and colonial India.
Joshua King is Associate Professor at Baylor University and author of Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain’s Age of Print (OSU Press, 2015). Winter Jade Werner is Assistant Professor at Wheaton College.
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Introduction Joshua King and Winter Jade Werner
Part I Reforming Religion and the Secular
Chapter 1 Religion and the Secular State: Loisy’s Use of “Religion” Prior to His Excommunication
Jeffrey L. Morrow
Chapter 2 A Commonwealth of Affection: Modern Hinduism and the Cultural History of the Study of Religion
J. Barton Scott
Chapter 3 “God’s Insurrection”: Politics and Faith in the Revolutionary Sermons of Joseph Rayner Stephens
Mike Sanders
Chapter 4 George Jacob Holyoake, Secularism, and Constructing “Religion” as an Anachronistic Repressor
David Nash
Chapter 5 Karl Marx and the Invention of the Secular
Dominic Erdozain
Part II Religion and the Materialities and Practices of Reading
Chapter 6 From Treasures to Trash, or, the Real History of “Family Bibles”
Mary Wilson Carpenter
Chapter 7 Rereading Queen Victoria’s Religion
Michael Ledger-Lomas
Chapter 8 Jewish Women’s Writing as a New Category of Affect
Richa Dwor
Chapter 9 Hybridous Monsters: Constructing “Religion” and “the Novel” in the Early Nineteenth Century
Miriam Elizabeth Burstein
Chapter 10 Material Religion: C. H. Spurgeon and the “Battle of the Styles” in Victorian Church Architecture
Dominic Janes
Chapter 11 Wilde’s Uses of Religion
Mark Knight
Part III Religion and Poetics in Postsecular Literary Studies
Chapter 12 Reading Psalms in Nineteenth-Century England: The Contact Zone of Jewish–Christian Scriptural Relations
Cynthia Scheinberg
Chapter 13 Postsecular English Studies and Romantic Cults of Authorship
Charles LaPorte
Chapter 14 Theologies of Inspiration: William Blake and Gerard Manley Hopkins
Michael D. Hurley
Chapter 15 William Blake, the Secularization of Religious Categories, and the History of Imagination
Peter Otto
List of Contributors
Index
