Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (review)

The most prominent virtue of Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature is its inclusive nature. After explaining their decision to focus on British Christianity during a version of the long nineteenth century, co-authors Mark Knight and Emma Mason quickly make it clear that the "religion" of their title applies to a wide range of denominational manifestations, beliefs, and social practices. Their ensuing engagement with textual expressions of this religious diversity reflects the historical reality that "different Christian traditions sought God in different places, from the realm of feeling to the realm of rational thought, from conservative to radical politics, and from practical action through doctrinal purity to the realm of aesthetics" (4). More pointedly, the character of this project has been determined by a rejection of the notion that nineteenth-century Britain generally experienced a form of secularization equated with religion's declining agency. The authors instead align themselves with the view that "the so-called secularization of religion in the latter part of the nineteenth century" represented "a diminution of the power and reach of the Established Church rather than the decline of Christian ideas and culture" (7).

Following an introduction that stakes out this historical perspective are six chapters that make good on the intention "to exemplify a number of specific religious ideas in relation to select literary texts" (9). The first chapter focuses on Protestant dissent, moving from the 1740s and the rise of Methodism into the first few decades of the nineteenth century. Chapter 2 then portrays the influence of Unitarians from the 1790s into mid-century. Chapter 3 discusses the Oxford Movement and its legacies, while the next chapter turns to "orthodox" (Trinitarian) evangelical Christianity in a period beginning with the opening of Exeter Hall in 1831. Chapter 5 uses case studies from the second half of the century to mount a more detailed challenge to the conventional secularization thesis. The project concludes with a discussion of Roman Catholic writers from the close of the nineteenth and the dawn of the twentieth century.

With its goal of introducing readers to a wide range of texts over a long period, this book's strength is not to be found in detailed or sustained analysis. Some chapters, however, stand out for combining survey with more specific modes of argumentation. Chapter 4 interestingly suggests that some contributions to the broader critique of popular fiction in the 1860s were fueled by a "recognition that sensation fiction and the conversion narratives favoured by Evangelicalism in general and Revivalism in particular, shared much in common" (139). And chapter 5 makes the interesting case for "the return of the Christian prophet" (173) in urban settings as depicted in late-nineteenth-century poetry and prose.

The third chapter ("The Oxford Movement: Wordsworth to Hopkins") comes across as a more haphazard tour of familiar territory and includes a few distracting errors. For instance, it describes John Keble as strategically "retreat[ing] from Oxford into his Littlemore parish" (89) and characterizes Walter Pater's The Renaissance (1873) as "a series of impressionistic essays on Italian art" (112). The first confuses two key events in Anglo Catholic history, and the second is a faulty description of a narrative that begins in medieval France and ends with a portrait of J. J. Winckelmann, a native of Brandenburg who journeyed to Rome to study the remains of Hellenic antiquity.

From its first sentence—where we are told that the Oxford Movement "is perhaps the most literary of those nineteenth-century theologies discussed in this book" (87)—the third chapter also features what some readers might consider this book's major flaw: its failure to identify the complications of considering "literature" as a discrete discursive field. For some time now scholars from various perspectives have considered the construction of a distinctive literary authority to be a signature nineteenth-century event. But with the exception of one early moment (when the...