Children of the Sixties: Post-Secular Victorian Studies and Victorian Secularization Theory

Abstract

Steve Bruce’s Secularization: In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory (2011) is good evidence, starting with its title, of the embattled status of various secularization theses, those arguments that link the ad-vent of modernity to forms of religious decline. The 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century featured a number of studies that challenged or qualified these secularization narratives, and Bruce’s book, inspired by the relative success of those studies, worries over the potential consequences of rearing a new generation of scholars inattentive to the reality of what he takes to be the massively diminished profile of religion in “modern industrial liberal democracies” (3-4). As the author of a book – The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774-1880 (2007) – incited by a countervailing frustration with the habitual coordination of our literary histories of the nineteenth century with a general notion of declining religion, I find it useful, here on the threshold of this special issue of Nineteenth-Century Prose, to pause over Bruce’s most recent defense of the “secularization paradigm” (1).