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

Published Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2018 ©2018

Click on the following:
Oxford Scholarship Online

Copies

Description 1 online resource Contents Cover; Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination; Copyright; Acknowledgments; Table of Contents; Introduction: Victorian Anthropology and Victorian Secularity; VICTORIAN ANTHROPOLOGY AND RELIGION SUI GENERIS; RELIGION, RACE, AND THE CULTIVATED SELF; 1: The Rubicon of Language: Max Müller, Evangelical Anthropology, and the History of True Religion; JAMES PRICHARD AND THE POLITICS OF MONOGENESIS; MAX MÜLLER, LANGUAGE, AND HUMAN SPIRITUAL AGENCY; POLYGENESIS AND THE ILLIBERAL IMAGINATION EVOLUTION AND THE DIVORCE OF COMPARATIVE RELIGION FROM ANTHROPOLOGY2: Arnoldian Secularism: Race and Political Theology from Celtic Literature to Literature and Dogma; THE BROAD CHURCH, AESTHETIC LIBERALISM, AND THE USES OF POLYGENESIS; HEBRAISM, HELLENISM, AND CULTURE; RELIGION AND THE VEXATIONS OF UNIVERSALISM; LATE ARNOLD: REAPPRAISING HOMOGENEITY; 3: History's Second-Hand Bookshop: Self-Cultivation and Scripturality in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and The Spanish Gypsy; ELIOT, RELIGION, AND THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL TURN; RACE AND THE MEDIATION OF SCRIPTURE; ELIOT'S ETHNOGRAPHIES OF READING MANY-SIDEDNESS, THE BILDUNGSROMAN, AND THE PREDICAMENT OF GENDER4: A More Liberal Surrender: Aestheticism, Asceticism, and Walter Pater's Erotics of Conversion; RENAISSANCE, SURVIVALS, AND AESTHETIC CULTURE; MARIUS THE EPICUREAN AND CONVERSION AS SURVIVAL; PATER'S AESTHETIC ASKESIS; MANY-SIDEDNESS AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF DISSENT; 5: National Supernaturalism: Andrew Lang, World Literature, and the Limits of Eclecticism; FOLKLORE THEORY FROM RACE TO EVOLUTION; LANG, PRIMITIVISM, AND MANY-SIDED POPULISM; THE ROMANTICISM OF SURVIVALS AND THE NEW DIFFUSIONISM; YEATS'S OCCULT UNIVERSALISM Summary 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 Notes Based on the author's thesis (doctoral)--Yale University Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCO, viewed April 9, 2018) Subject Religion in literature -- History -- 19th century English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism Anthropology of religion -- England -- History -- 19th century Race -- Religious aspects -- History -- 19th century Ethnicity -- Religious aspects -- History -- 19th century Romanticism -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. Religion in literature Race -- Religious aspects Ethnicity -- Religious aspects Anthropology of religion English literature Romanticism England Great Britain Genre/Form Electronic books History Criticism, interpretation, etc. Form Electronic book ISBN 9780192540584 0192540580 9780191850332 0191850330

  Permalink