This panel explores how new understandings of nineteenth-century secularization call for a reappraisal of the novel—the genre that Georg Lukács’s famously called “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.” This familiar link between the novel and religious doubt, however, relies on an increasingly dubious narrative of progressive secularization, a narrative in which modernity brings the inexorable demise of religion. Complicating this idea, a host of recent books on Romantic and Victorian literature, such as Colin Jager’s Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age (2014), Sebastian Lecourt’s Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics and the Secular Imagination (2018), and Joshua King and Winter Jade Werner’s edited volume Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion: Literary, Historical, and Religious Studies in Dialogue (2019), have argued that the concepts of the religious and the secular are not simply opposed to each other but are mutually dependent. According to these scholars, the very definition of religion as private, interior belief in otherworldly doctrines is itself a modern construction born simultaneously with the secular. The secular, in turn, emerges—only by contrast with religion—as both a putatively neutral political sphere and a self-enclosed, mechanistic natural realm.

Extending these insights, this panel reads the nineteenth-century novel as frequently questioning the rigid distinction between the spiritual and the material—between private religious belief and secular public life. Thus, instead of emphasizing interior doctrinal beliefs, the panelists explore how the materiality of the novel engages embodied religious practices: daily devotional habits, liturgical forms, and corporate preaching. Here the panel responds to the call issued lately by Norman Vance, Mark Knight, and Lori Branch to rethink the novel from a post-secular vantage. As Branch explains, “post-” does not signify the end the secular or the return of “premodern religiosity” but rather an effort to move beyond the linear, progressive narrative of secularization described above. While leaving ample time for open discussion, the following three 15- to 18-minute papers will unfold just how such a post-secular approach might elucidate religion in the novel.

Entering the seemingly disenchanted world of realist fiction, Christine Colón will begin the session by considering Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847)—a novel whose eponymous protagonist practices a simple Christian devotion that lacks spiritual ecstasy. Such mundane devotion, argues Colón, often puzzles critics who tend to treat religion as a supernatural escape and who therefore overlook the daily fidelity that characterizes Agnes’s life. The quotidian narrative form of the novel, then, does not hinder but rather catalyzes Agnes’s religion. Where Agnes might, to use Charles Taylor’s influential language from A Secular Age (2007), seem trapped in an “immanent frame” and thus closed to spiritual transcendence, Colón argues instead that the novel exemplifies what theologian Stanley Hauerwas calls the “radical ordinary”—a faith rooted in steady perseverance and a daily, if imperfect, love of neighbor.

Building on Colón’s interrogation of the split between mundane life and otherworldly faith, Joseph McQueen claims that George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) deploys Jewish and Christian liturgy to give material form to otherwise abstract ethical commitments. Eliot, of course, sought to rescue traditional religious ethics from the collapse of orthodox religious belief. Daniel Deronda becomes the bearer of such ethical values, but—perhaps surprisingly—the novel frequently actualizes Daniel’s ethical ideals through liturgical language and forms. Again engaging Charles Taylor—specifically Taylor’s notion of how modernity tends to “excarnate” religion by relegating it to private, interior belief shorn of material, bodily enactment—McQueen suggests that Eliot resists such interiorization by using liturgy to give flesh to Daniel’s commitments.

Where McQueen sees liturgical forms as serving Eliot’s realism, Amy Coté observes how the novel deploys still another element of a traditional religious service: the sermon. At first glance, sermons in the Victorian novel might simply figure as a dull backdrop for the ‘real’ plot, which develops by way of furtive glances and ill-fated valentines exchanged between pews. Even worse, sermons might seem to symbolize authoritarian discourse—an antithesis to the dialogic, liberal self ostensibly cultivated by the novel. However, such readings, Coté asserts, rely on the overly simplistic opposition between the religious and secular described at the outset of this proposal. By contrast, Coté argues that even novels averse to orthodox belief, such as Mary Augusta Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888), nevertheless use the sermon to inculcate liberal selfhood.

Far from simply narrating the disappearance of religion and the arrival of the secular, the novel asks us to rethink both of these concepts. That rethinking yields a much richer account of their deep imbrication and interdependence.