Religion and Secularism in Nineteenth-Century Literature
This split-level course introduces students to the “religious turn” of much twenty-first-century literary scholarship, as well as to the complex relationship between literature and secularization in anglophone culture since the Enlightenment. Religious expressions are found throughout the cultural record of modernity, and yet until recently it was common for academic literary scholars to speak and write as though religion would soon disappear from the world. Whole artistic movements once understood to represent a break from religion - realism, Symbolism, decadence, the Black Arts movement – can in a different light seem like expressions of religion. Works that once stood out for their iconoclasm now stand out for their commitments to different kinds of religiosity. As Valentine Cunningham remarks, literature in English tends to be heretical, for certain, but this amounts to a reason for literary scholars to study religion, rather than the reverse. It is a major critical issue in our day.
This course will cover literature ranging from the eighteenth century to the present, but the bulk of the material will come from nineteenth-century Britain and America. We will treat different genres: poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and probably drama. For undergraduates, this course may fulfill the Historical Period requirement (since most of the material will be pre-1945).