In literary studies and especially in the literature classroom, scholars often discuss religion as theme or context. Recently, however, literary scholars have begun to treat religion as methodology and theory. For example, Gauri Viswanathan argues for occultism as an organizing aesthetics for nineteenth-century Anglophone culture, while Lori Branch and Mark Knight propose a “postsecular” approach to literary study that reads texts both theologically and critically. More broadly, scholars of religious studies have asked us to resist reducing religion to belief, and rather to attend to embodied spiritualities, practices of devotion, and the methodological potential of religion-- while still attending to histories of how some religious communities have consolidated power. This approach to the complexity of religious life has potential to illuminate literary studies, yet “religion and literature” largely remains an isolated subfield. This panel aims to demonstrate the value of new work at the intersection of religion and literature from nineteenth-century English studies for literary study in general.

In “Biological Confession: Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and the Secularization of the Sacrament of Penance,” Ryan Siemers argues that Brontë’s novel Villette (1853) transforms confession from Catholic ritual to biological urge in the actions of its heroine, Lucy Snowe. Despite her Protestantism, Lucy confesses to a Catholic priest. Afterwards, she reinterprets her confession in scientistic terms as a product of her “nervous system”—in effect, a biological compulsion—divorced from religious provenance and morality. She recasts sacramental confession as an abnormal outlet for this compulsion, and implies that her spiritual autobiography—her novel—is a natural outlet akin to confiding in friends. In this transformation, Brontë precedes Breuer and Freud’s Studies on Hysteria, which similarly secularizes confession, by 40 years. Though Villette’s influence in this regard has gone unnoted, Lucy Snowe’s biological confession informs the history of the novel and persists in popular culture, from Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier to HBO’s Mad Men.

Just as ritual can become biological urge, mysticism can become epistemological method. In “Mysticism as Modern Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing,” Mimi Winick illuminates a tradition of women writers who embraced mysticism as precedent for enthusiastic knowledge practices. First in novels and later in scholarly writing on religion itself, they invoked mysticism to assert aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual authority, in an impassioned style. She traces this practice from George Eliot’s Romola (1861-62) to Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism (1911), suggesting how mid-19th-century women’s fiction introduced a mystical method that paved the way for more explicit uses of mysticism by women writing nonfiction in the next generation.

Such writing deployed mysticism as embodied knowledge. Aubrey Plourde finds a further example of religious practice as embodied knowledge in Robert Browning’s poetry. In “Arrested Development and Religious Experience in Robert Browning’s ‘Caliban Upon Setebos,’” Plourde analyzes a poem that demands reexamination following Victorian studies’ reckoning with race and religion. Subtitled “Natural Theology in the Island,” this poem invites readers to understand Caliban’s speech as representing his belief. Indeed, Caliban’s theology has generally been understood to represent naive, misguided faith. Plourde argues, conversely, that “Caliban” aestheticizes an experience of spiritual adolescence to mobilize sophisticated dimensions of religiosity. Rather than juxtaposing the enslaved speaker’s theology against Browning’s or defending his racial politics, this essay reads the poem as simultaneously a theological exploration, an articulation of embodied religious experience, and an expression of protest from an enslaved believer.

Each of these papers argues that these texts-- Brontë’s novel, Browning’s poem, and Eliot’s and Underhill’s prose-- help us shift from seeing religion as theme or context to recognizing religion as a creative and critical element shaping literary texts and our own scholarly methods. By thus regarding religion and literature, this panel demonstrates that religion is not peripheral to literary innovation and its socio-historical significance, but central to both.