Cultivating belief : Victorian anthropology, liberal aesthetics, and the secular imagination / Sebastian Lecourt.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lecourt, Sebastian, author.

Contributor:

Alumni and Friends Memorial Book Fund.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Religion in literature--History--19th century.

Religion in literature.

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Anthropology of religion--England--History--19th century.

Anthropology of religion.

Race--Religious aspects--History--19th century.

Race.

Ethnicity--Religious aspects--History--19th century.

Ethnicity.

Secularism--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Secularism.

Liberalism--Religious aspects--History--19th century.

Liberalism.

Individualism--Great Britain--19th century--Religious aspects.

Individualism.

Romanticism--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Romanticism.

History.

Liberalism--Religious aspects.

Ethnicity--Religious aspects.

Race--Religious aspects.

Great Britain.

England.

Physical Description:

vii, 229 pages ; 23 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford, United Kingdom : Oxford University Press, 2018.

Summary:

Cultivating Belief 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. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 The Rubicon of Language: Max Müller, Evangelical Anthropology, and the History of True Religion 33

2 Arnoldian Secular-ism: Race and Political Theology from Celtic Literature to Literature and Dogma 68

3 History's Second-Hand Bookshop: Self-Cultivation and Scripturality in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and The Spanish Gypsy 102

4 A More Liberal Surrender: Aestheticism, Asceticism, and Walter Pater's Erotics of Conversion 130

5 National Supernaturalism: Andrew Lang, World Literature, and the Limits of Eclecticism 163.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 201-222) and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Alumni and Friends Memorial Book Fund.

Other Format:

Electronic version: Lecourt, Sebastian. Cultivating belief.

ISBN:

0198812493

9780198812494

OCLC:

1002112954