A Post-Secular Victorian Study: Religion, Reading, and Imagining Britain

Abstract

I welcome William McKelvy’s reflections, for he addresses more explicitly an argument he pursued in The English Cult of Literature (2007): secularization narratives that rely on the demise of religion, co-ordinated with the rise of something to usurp its authority (e.g., secular literature), need to be disabled as automatic guides to the history of nine-teenth-century Britain. Not only do these narratives need to be shelved, but they should also be replaced with a “Post-Secular Victorian Studies.” While I affirm McKelvy’s call for post-secular scholarship, I have reser-vations about his description of what he calls “Victorian secularization theory” (27 above). So I will state them briefly before proposing a sub-ject for a “post-secular Victorian study”: the relationship between read-ing and religious visions of the nation in nineteenth-century Britain.