Cultivating Belief

Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination

Sebastian Lecourt

Explores how Victorian literary writers such as George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Matthew Arnold used anthropology to rethink the relationship between religion and liberal individualism
Puts recent critical work on Victorian liberalism (David Wayne Thomas, Elaine Hadley) into conversation with new critiques of secularism (Talal Asad, Charles Taylor, John Lardas Modern)
Re-envisions Victorian writing not as a site of religious crisis but rather as a place where intellectuals began to define religion as a generic feature of human life whose function could be debated — within both national and imperial frames
Examines the impact of anthropology upon aestheticism and concepts of self-cultivation

Cultivating Belief

Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination

Sebastian Lecourt

Description

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.

Cultivating Belief

Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination

Sebastian Lecourt

Introduction: Victorian Anthropology and Victorian Secularity
1:The Rubicon of Language: Max Müller, Evangelical Anthropology, and the History of True Religion
2:Arnoldian Secularism: Race and Political Theology from Celtic Literature to Literature and Dogma
3:History's Second-Hand Bookshop: Self-Cultivation and Scripturality in Daniel Deronda and The Spanish Gypsy
4:A More Liberal Surrender: Aestheticism, Asceticism, and Walter Pater's Erotics of Conversion
5:National Supernaturalism: Andrew Lang, World Literature, and the Limits of Eclecticism
Coda: Aesthetic Secularism

Cultivating Belief

Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination

Sebastian Lecourt

Author Information

Sebastian Lecourt, Assistant Professor, University of Houston

Sebastian Lecourt received his Ph.D. from Yale University and is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston. His work focuses on Victorian literature and questions of secularization, colonialism, and world literature. His essays have also appeared in PMLA, Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Literature Compass, and he has held fellowships at the Johns Hopkins University, Rutgers University, and Universität Konstanz. He is working on a new book project entitled The Genres of Comparative Religion, 1783-1947.

Cultivating Belief

Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination

Sebastian Lecourt

Reviews and Awards

"Sebastian Lecourts Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination . . . could not be timelier. In an era of resurgent populism, authoritarianism, and intolerance, each of which is oddly bound to the neoliberal assault on social equality, the very notion of a cultivated liberal self can seem naïve or antiquarian. Yet Lecourts rich account of the intersections in Victorian intellectual culture between individualist self-cultivation and the unchosen heritages that are otherwise anathema to it seems hopeful just now. It suggests that we might profitably look back to a nineteenth-century liberalism that is flexible, robust, and inclusive enough to help shore up democracy." - Anna Neill, author of Primitive Minds: Evolution and Spiritual Experience in the Victorian Novel

"Cultivating Belief should figure prominently in the historical re- evaluation of secularism and cultural pluralism, alike, because of its attention to the logic whereby pluralism requires universalism, the many depending upon the one. As it teases apart the ambivalences and contradictions in Aestheticisms attempt to admire what it hopes to overcome, to embody the passion of one-sidedness while holding onto the aesthetic play of multi-sidedness, it will certainly become the resource one turns to when wishing to understand the many permutations of racial and religious thought in the period." - Brad Evans, author of Before Cultures: The Ethnographic Imagination in American Literature, 1865-1920

"In his lucid and compelling monograph, Lecourt shows how Victorian studies will profit by a clearer understanding of modern belief. He follows Taylor and the anthropologists Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood to a more nuanced depiction of the 'competing Victorian secularities' that have helped to create the contemporary default intellectual positions . . . Cultivating Belief is thus good to think with, as well as a delight to read — a timely and important contribution to thinking on 19th century culture." - Charles LaPorte, author of Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible