This panel aims to catalyze discussion about the role of religious texts and traditions within nineteenth-century British literature, featuring new scholarship in this growing area of critical inquiry. Over the past fifteen years, literary studies has underscored the variety and vitality of religion in the Romantic and Victorian eras: books including Kirstie Blair’s Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion (2012), Norman Vance’s Bible and Novel: Narrative Authority and the Death of God (2013), Joshua King’s Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain’s Age of Print (2015), and Sebastian Lecourt’s Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics and the Secular Imagination (2018) exemplify this expanding religious turn. As a result, what was once regarded as a century defined by doubt has become increasingly regarded as an age of repositioning and reconfiguring religious belief. Yet if it is by now almost cliché to note the inadequacy of tidy, linear narratives of the decline of faith, the critical imperative both to expand and clarify our understanding of “religion” in nineteenth-century literature has become all the more pressing, especially because recent interdisciplinary debates about secularization require precise terminology.

Building on these current scholarly discussions, the papers included in this proposed panel take up redefinition vis-à-vis literary form, demonstrating how specific poetics, tropes, and genres have the capacity to generate new understandings of religious texts and practices. In so doing, this panel responds to the problem of taxonomy highlighted in the introduction to the recent double special issue of Nineteenth-Century Literature (September to December 2018, edited by Charles LaPorte and Sebastian Lecourt), entitled “New Religious Movements and Secularization.” While the presentations all examine varieties of Christianity, this focus allows the panel to offer a coherent and nuanced picture of the controversies and complexities of this particular religion at this historical moment. More specifically, this panel’s examination of textual form in relation to Christian liturgical, ecclesiastical, and biblical contexts will address an important issue highlighted in Lecourt’s recent book (2018): the misguided relegation of “religion” to the private sphere of inward belief, a notion that Lecourt identifies as a construction of Protestant liberalism that continues to define scholarly concepts of religion. In various and innovative ways, the following three 15- to 20-minute papers interrogate and recontextualize this central concept, thus creating opportunities for robust discussion within the panel’s allotted time.

Responding to recent revisions to secularization narratives made by Charles Taylor and other thinkers, Joseph McQueen will begin by explaining the contrast between the linear time characteristic of secular modernity and what Taylor calls “higher times,” which gather and reorder temporality. McQueen will mobilize these concepts to reconsider John Keble’s bestselling and influential volume of devotional poetry The Christian Year (1827). He will argue that The Christian Year blends aesthetic and liturgical forms to challenge secular modernity, as the patterns of doubling achieved in this volume’s biblical allusions instantiate Taylor’s concept of “higher times” in poetic form. McQueen will thereby challenge understandings of religion as consisting merely of interior belief in doctrinal propositions. As a result, he will draw unexpected yet compelling continuities between Keble’s seemingly conservative poetics and the work of other nineteenth-century writers who are regarded as far less orthodox yet nonetheless remained fascinated by ritual—including Mary Augusta Ward, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde.

To continue this discussion about the potential of ritual to reshape our ideas about religious experiences, Sean Barry will concentrate on the reliquary tropes evident in the work of Irish poet, novelist, historian, and journalist Thomas Moore. Putting Moore into dialogue with the theoretical works of Édouard Gilssant, Barry will analyze Moore’s Tales of an Irishman in Search of a Religion (1833) to re-examine the Protestant aversion to Catholic practices of venerating relics. Published shortly after the Catholic Emancipation of 1829, this prose satire of conversion narratives advances both a social and a theological commentary: it draws from the work of church fathers including St. Jerome to conceptualize relics not as objects to be prayed to but, rather, with. Barry will show that the contested status of the relic in Romantic Ireland illuminates sectarian differences in the reading of allegory, differences that are important for understanding the intersections between literary form, political identity, and ecclesiastical contexts.

Finally, Sarah Corrigan will consider the relationship between the Church and the world in her discussion of the novels of Thomas Hardy, drawing attention to how religious texts and religious spaces provoke discomfort and even violence in the lives of Hardy’s characters. Corrigan will trace the echoes of biblical wisdom literature, particularly the Book of Job, in The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). As Corrigan will explain, Hardy not only re-examines biblical texts that have been marginalized by the Church but also problematizes ecclesiastical texts that ostensibly offer support for unjust punishment. By giving attention to Hardy’s intertextual use of biblical understandings of both justice and mercy, Corrigan reconsiders the kind of sacred spaces that remain in Hardy’s novels once the Church itself has lost its religious power. Hardy thus opens challenging questions about theodicy and retributive justice that radiate into wider issues of fate and suffering evident in the work of many writers at the fin-de-siècle.

Taken together, these papers will generate productive discussion of nineteenth-century British literature and interrogate the construct of religion as consisting merely of inward belief in transcendent ideals. Through careful close readings and attention to relevant aesthetic, historical, and social contexts, the panelists invite alternative, provocative understandings of religious writers and readers in the Romantic and Victorian eras.