Inventing the Secular: Literature and Religion from Medieval to Modern

0930-1000 Registration and coffee/tea in the Rainy Hall (=RH)
(Plenary events in RH. Parallels: in RH and Elizabeth Templeton Lecture Theatre = ET)

1000-1005 Welcome (RH)
Alison Jack (University of Edinburgh)

1005-1035 Introduction: ‘Inventing the Secular?’ (RH)
Erik Tonning (University of Bergen)

1035-1045 Short break

1045-1215 Keynote (RH)
Helen Cooper (University of Cambridge)
‘Ways Around Doctrine in the Middle Ages’

Chair: Laura Saetveit Miles (University of Bergen)

1215-1315 Lunch (RH)

1315-1415 Parallel panels

Panel 1: (RH)

Clare Stainthorp (Queen Mary University of London)
Nineteenth-Century Freethought and its Resistance to Fiction’

Mark Knight (Lancaster University)
‘Narrating Religious Stories of Belief in Middlemarch’

Chair: Madeleine Potter (Edge Hill University)

Panel 2: (Elizabeth Templeton Lecture Theatre = ET)

Elizabeth Anderson (University of Aberdeen)
Post-secular Spirituality, Vibrant Ecologies’

Theodore Trost (University of Alabama)
‘Epiphany at the Capitol’

Chair: Laura Saetveit Miles (University of Bergen)

1415-1430 Coffee break

1430-1600 Parallel panels:

Panel 3: (RH)

Jamie Callison (Nord University / University of Agder)
‘Poetic Conversions in a Secular Age: Epiphany, Human Rights, and Retreat in David Jones’

Madeleine Potter (Edge Hill University)
‘Wastelands and Hinterlands: The Unspeakable Sacred in Geoffrey Hill and T. S. Eliot’

Chair: Suzanne Hobson (Queen Mary University of London)

Panel 4: (ET)

Wassim Rustom (University of Bergen)
‘Aestheticism, Materialism, and the Problem of Individuation’

Stefan Fisher-Høyrem (University of Agder)
‘Secular Time: A New Origin Story’

Stuart McWilliams (University of Oslo)
‘Secularities of Death’

Chair: James Williams (University of York)

1600-1610 Short break

1610-1710 Parallel panels

Panel 5 (RH) (Remote delegate panel: Zoom link TBA)

Joanna Rzepa (University of Essex)
‘Modernism and Theology: T. S. Eliot, John Middleton Murry, and the “Pure Poetry” Debate’

Charles LaPorte (University of Washington)
‘Celebrating Eidh with Matthew Arnold: Daljit Nagra and Post-Secular Poetry’

Chair: Vincent Pecora (University of Utah)

Panel 6 (ET) (Remote delegate panel: Zoom link TBA)

Michael Dopffel (University of Bergen)
‘Defoe, Trust, and Spirits as “Matters of Fact”: The Eclipse of Simulated Transcendence’

Dirk Johannsen (University of Oslo)
‘Pietistic Atheism and the Nordic Modern Breakthrough: On a Narrative Culture of Secularity’

Chair: Emma Mason (University of Warwick)

1710-1815 Wine reception for delegates in Edinburgh. (RH)
A Zoom link will be provided for remote delegates who wish to chat informally                 

0940-1000 Coffee/tea (available in RH+ET)

1000-1100 Parallel panels

Panel 7 (RH)

Hannah Zdansky (Belmont Abbey College)
‘Two Sides of the Same Coin: The Perceived Tension between the Religious and the Secular in Guy of Warwick’

Kevin Seidel (Eastern Mennonite University)
‘Religion and Literature: Exit, Border, Gap, Ecotone’

Chair: Fionnuala O’Neill Tonning (University of Bergen)

Panel 8 (ET)

Vincent Pecora (University of Utah)
‘Jonah Without a Whale: Defoe and Conrad’

John Bolin (University of Exeter)
‘“By way of indirection”: Age of Iron, “Redemption”, and the “mystic”’

Chair: Matthew Mutter (Bard College)

1100-1115 Coffee break

1115-1215 Parallel panels

Panel 9: (RH)

Henry Mead (Talinn University)
‘The Fall of the Fall in Literary Modernism’

Andrea Rinaldi (University of Bergen)
‘“What is this Christianity?”: Western History, Catholic Heritage and Confucian Ethic in Ezra Pound’s Secular Religion’

Chair: Suzanne Hobson (Queen Mary University of London)

Panel 10: (ET)

Martin Potter (University of York)
‘Poets Sacralising the Secular: David Jones, Les Murray, Michael Symmons Roberts’

Eirik Fevang (University of Bergen)
‘Charles Péguy’s Paradoxical Spatiality in the Work of Charles Taylor and John Milbank’

Chair: Madeleine Potter (Edge Hill University)

1215-1315 Lunch (RH)

1315-1445 Keynote (RH)

Colin Jager (Rutgers University)
‘Is Secularism a Theodicy: Coleridge, Melville, Hopkins

Chair: Erik Tonning (University of Bergen)

1445-1500 Coffee break

1500-1600 Parallel panels

Panel 11: (RH)

Rebekah Lamb (University of St Andrews)
‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Aesthetics and the Problem of the Secular’

Sally Jones (Northwestern Polytechnic, Alberta, Canada)
‘Reconsidering Edith Wharton: Assumptions of Secularity’

Chair: Mark Knight (Lancaster University)

Panel 12: (ET)

Alastair Minnis (Yale University)
‘Marriage After Aristotle: Late-medieval Secularization of the Marital Estate’

Elizabeth Robertson (University of Glasgow)
‘Wilful Griselda: Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale, Voluntarism, and the Secularization of the Female Subject’

Chair: Hannah Zdansky (Belmont Abbey College)

1600-1610 Short break

1610-1710 Parallel panels

Panel 13 (RH)

Matthew Mutter (Bard College)
‘The Ambiguous Secularism of Modernist Social Science’

Suzanne Hobson (Queen Mary University of London)
‘“Rationalists in Literature”: Unbelief and (non)-Modernist Fiction between the Wars’

Chair: Jade Winter Werner (Wheaton College)

Panel 14 (ET)

John-Wilhelm Flattun (University of Bergen)
‘Thomas Middleton’s Performative Laws: Towards a Secular Theology’

Gweno Williams (University of York)
‘Was Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-73) the First Published Secular Woman Writer in English?’

Chair: Laura Saetveit Miles (University of Bergen)

1930 Conference dinner at Vittoria on the Bridge restaurant (19 George IV Bridge, Edinburgh EH1)

0940-1000 Coffee/tea (RH + ET)

1000-1100 Parallel panels

Panel 15: (RH)

Fionnuala O’Neill Tonning (University of Bergen)
‘Christ as Tragic Hero: Sixteenth-Century Neo-Latin Passion and Resurrection Plays’

Alison Shell (University College London)
‘Soul of the age!’: Jonson’s and Milton’s tributes to Shakespeare

Chair: Gweno Williams (University of York)

Panel 16: (ET)

James Williams (University of York)
‘Wilderness is Paradise: FitzGerald, Omar, and Secular Persianism’

Winter Jade Werner (Wheaton College)
‘The Hikyat Abdullah and the Missionary Press: Cosmopolitan Religiosity in Colonial Melaka’

Chair: Mark Knight (Lancaster University)

1100-1115 Coffee break

1115-1245 Keynote (RH)

Emma Mason (University of Warwick)
‘Kenosis and the Ecological Thought in Nineteenth-Century Poetry’

Chair: Laura Saetveit Miles (University of Bergen)

1245-1345 Lunch (RH)

1345-1445 Parallel panels

Panel 17 (RH) (Combined remote/in-person delegate panel: Zoom link TBA)

Ryan McDermott (University of Pittsburgh)
‘Four Kinds of Genealogy, Modern and Medieval: Legal, Critical, Phylogenetic, Consanguineous’

Sebastian Lecourt (University of Houston)
‘Secularism and the Anthology’

Chair: Hannah Zdansky (Belmont Abbey College)

Panel 18 (ET) (Remote delegate panel: Zoom link TBA)

Regina Schwartz (Northwestern University)
‘Sacramental Poetics’

Anna Svendsen (Franciscan University of Steubenville)
‘David Jones on Liturgy and the Limitations of Form in the Modern Saecula’

Chair: Erik Tonning (University of Bergen)

1445-1500 Coffee break

1500-1545 Concluding roundtable discussion (RH):

‘“Inventing the Secular” across literary periods and disciplinary frameworks. How to extend the conversation?’

Participants: Alastair Minnis (Yale University), Alison Shell (University College London), Colin Jager (Rutgers University), Mark Knight (Lancaster University), and Vincent Pecora (University of Utah).

Chair: Jolyon Mitchell (University of Edinburgh)

CONFERENCE ENDS

Alison Jack
Welcome

Alison Jack is senior lecturer  in Bible and Literature  and Assistant Principal of New College. Her recent publications include The  Prodigal Son  in English and American  Literature (OUP  2019). She is the Director of the Scottish Network  for  Religion and Literature, and Programme Organiser  for the MTh/MSc in Religion and  Literature  at  the School of Divinity.

Erik Tonning
Introduction: ‘Inventing the Secular?’

Erik Tonning is Professor of British Literature and Culture in the University of Bergen. He is the author of Samuel Beckett’s Abstract Drama (Peter Lang, 2007), and Modernism and Christianity (Palgrave, 2014), as well as co-editor of Modernism, Christianity and Apocalypse (Brill, 2015), David Jones: A Christian Modernist? (Brill, 2017), and Transformations of Tragedy: Christian Influences From Medieval to Modern (Brill, 2019). He co-directs the interdisciplinary research group ‘Literature and Religion’ in the University of Bergen. In the academic year 2021-22, he is hosted as Visiting Fellow of the Divinity School, University of Edinburgh by the Scottish Network for Religion and Literature.

Keynote:

Helen Cooper (University of Cambridge)
‘Ways Around Doctrine in the Middle Ages’

Almost all forms of experience and language in the medieval West were underlain by Christian doctrine, from the perception of the natural world to individual behaviour. This paper will consider various ways in which writers sought to sidestep predetermined answers or judgements, to acknowledge a range of human actions and desires outside religious prescription or condemnation. These ranged across the whole range of seriousness: improper songs and stories; the claim that hell was much more fun than heaven; the substitution of animals for humans as protagonists; physicians’ recommendations for sexual activity as essential for health; and attempts to answer the big metaphysical questions about the suffering of the innocent. Many of these are taken up by Chaucer, not least in his location of some of his works in pagan settings where the characters have no access to official doctrinal beliefs.

Helen Cooper is Emeritus Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge.  She holds Emeritus and Honorary Fellowships at University College, Oxford, and a Life Fellowship at Magdalene College, Cambridge.  She has particular interests in the cultural continuations across the medieval and early modern periods, including early printed editions of Middle English texts. Her books include Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance (Ipswich, 1978); Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Oxford,1989); The English Romance in Time (Oxford, 2004); Shakespeare and the Medieval World (London, 2010); and a modern-spelling edition of Malory’s Morte Darthur for Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford, 1998).

Panel 1:

Claire Stainthorp (Queen Mary University of London)
‘Nineteenth-Century Freethought and its Resistance to Fiction’

At first glance, it might seem unsurprising that Victorian freethinkers, with their commitment to truth and reason, were resistant to the fictional mode. As radical agitators who sought to highlight the hypocrisies of religion and remove its influence from British politics and society, their focus was on stating their case for secular reform in essays, debates, dialogues, and correspondence, but they also regularly published poetry. The absence of fiction is particularly notable when compared to the proliferation of short stories and serialised novels in the evangelical press, the form and content of which freethought periodicals often borrowed and reworked for their own secular ends. So why did freethinkers resist fictional writing that could communicate and progress their secular cause? This paper will make two preliminary suggestions. Firstly, that freethinkers were equivocal about the place of such literature in the context of a reform movement that so often delegitimised Biblical authority by emphasising its fictionality. And secondly, that there is a fundamental misalignment between atheist acceptance and the standard narrative arc found in Victorian novels about unbelief (such as Mary Ward’s Robert Elsmere) that recount a journey through doubt that concludes with a renewed form of faith.

Clare Stainthorp is a Leverhulme Truth Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London. Her current research focuses on the nineteenth-century freethought movement and their periodicals. Her book, Constance Naden: Scientist, Philosopher, Poet, was published in 2019. She co-edited the Routledge volume Nineteenth Century Religion, Literature and Society: Disbelief and New Beliefs with Naomi Hetherington (2020). Her work has also appeared in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Journal of Victorian Culture.

Mark Knight (Lancaster University)
‘Narrating Religious Stories of Belief in Middlemarch’

Although I have expressed reservations elsewhere about the treatment of faith in George Eliot’s novels, this paper will explore what Rebecca Mead calls my life in Middlemarch, with the aim of exploring how we might tell religious stories of belief in a secular age. The unlikely prompt for this paper is the figure of Mr. Casaubon, a man whose attempt to write the key to all mythologies sees him ‘lost among small closets and winding stairs’; concerned with footnotes and methodological questions rather than a story of belief. But rather than emphasising my distance to Casaubon, I want to consider our proximity and use the parallels I see between us as an opportunity to read Eliot’s novel against the grain. In doing so, I test the capacity of Middlemarch to allow its more theologically inclined readers to narrate religious stories of belief.

Mark Knight is Professor of Literature, Religion and Victorian Studies in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. He is the author of Chesterton and Evil (2004), Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (with Emma Mason, 2006), An Introduction to Religion and Literature (2009), and Good Words: Evangelicalism and the Victorian Novel (2019), as well as various edited collections. Mark co-edits the New Directions in Religion and Literature book series for Bloomsbury and is the General Editor of the journal Literature and Theology.

Panel 2:

Elizabeth Anderson (University of Aberdeen)
‘Post-secular Spirituality, Vibrant Ecologies’

The totality of the universe – organic and inorganic matter, human and other-than-human organisms, swirls of stardust – is vital, vibrant, agential, interrelated, alive. This is the basic premise of a range of theoretical work that is drawing greater attention across the academy under such banners as new materialism and posthumanism. Rosi Braidotti acknowledges the spiritual residue inherent in commitment to, and belief in, theoretical positions, particularly in the link between thinking and affect, critique and affirmation. For Braidotti, in engaging with the post-secular, critical theory itself holds a kind of spirituality in our investments, affects and relations. However important elements of the spiritual implications of this theoretical work, and the way many of its core principles have been anticipated by Indigenous knowledges, remain undeveloped. In this paper I foreground the spiritual resonances of academic explorations of a vibrant cosmos through exploring the intersection between the recent ontological turn in cultural theory and the animist worldviews framed by Indigenous traditions and considering how such relational ontologies can find expression in literary texts.

Elizabeth Anderson is a Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Aberdeen. She is the author of H.D. and Modernist Religious Imagination (Bloomsbury, 2013) and Material Spirituality in Modernist Women’s Writing (Bloomsbury, 2020), co-editor of Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and Associate Editor of Literature & Theology.

Theodore Trost (University of Alabama)
‘Epiphany at the Capitol’

Religious imagery, biblical quotations, and hymn singing all figured prominently in the flow of events that took place in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021. Some in the crowd sang the hymn "Amazing Grace." Others waved banners that bore the image of a lion under which was written "Proverbs 30.30"—a biblical reference that some in the crowd might have recognized as containing the words "The lion in you never retreats." Still others assumed prayerful postures of penitence and praise while recorded music reverberated the refrain "Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty" from the contemporary canticle "Revelation Song," composed by Jennie Lee Riddle. What might these scenes, captured on video and published by the Uncivil Religion Project (among others), suggest about the categories of sacred and secular? How does the hymnodic and biblical literature engaged by the crowds advance their purposes in challenging power, or in manifesting empowerment, as they approach the cradle of democracy on the day of Epiphany? These are the questions this paper will explore.

Theodore Louis Trost is Professor in Religious Studies and the New College at the University of Alabama, USA.  He is the author of Douglas Horton and the Ecumenical Impulse in American Religion (Harvard, 2002) and editor or co-editor of several collections including The African Diaspora and the Study of Religion (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and Love Across the Atlantic: US-UK Romance in Popular Culture (Edinburgh, 2020).  He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University.  

Panel 3:

Jamie Callison (Nord University / University of Agder)
‘Poetic Conversions in a Secular Age: Epiphany, Human Rights, and Retreat in David Jones’

The Victorian critic Matthew Arnold’s famous contention that, ‘most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry’ placed literature and religion in an antagonistic, even rivalrous relationship. These tensions have been exacerbated by constructions of the secular that have traded on a divide between knowledge and beliefs, with literature and religion confined to the second category. Exploring the work of the Catholic poet and painter David Jones, this paper discusses the ways in which imaginative literature draws on various religious public discourses, rather than attempting to replace them. These include accounts of the twentieth- century retreat movement and early iterations of human rights. In Jones’s work, this paper goes on to show, these elements come together to constitute a critique of British imperialism from a distinctly religious perspective. In this scenario, religious ideas feed literary creativity and confer a public purpose on what might otherwise be considered idiosyncratic, non-engaged modernist poetry. This reimagined relationship between literature and religion serves as a window on to neglected aspects of modernity and as a challenge to secular constructions of the public sphere.

Jamie Callison is currently Associate Professor of English at Nord University. In August 2022, he will join the Department of Foreign Languages and Translation at the University of Agder as an Associate Professor of English Literature. His articles on T. S. Eliot, David Jones and twentieth-century religious culture have appeared in ELH, Literature and Theology, and Modernist Cultures. He has published (with Thomas Goldpaugh) a critical edition of a previously unpublished book- length poem by David Jones entitled The Grail Mass (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018; paperback: 2022) and his monograph Modernism and Religion: Between Mysticism and Orthodoxy will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2023.

Madeleine Potter (Edge Hill University)
‘Wastelands and Hinterlands: The Unspeakable Sacred in Geoffrey Hill and T. S. Eliot’

My paper will explore the way in which an experience of the decay and corruption of the modern secular world can paradoxically foster an apprehension of the sacred. Through a contrastive analysis of T.S. Eliot and Geoffrey Hill, I shall argue that it is through an exploration of the absence of the divine in one’s experience that a sacramental sense of poetics can emerge. I shall draw on Hill’s argument expounded in his critical writings about the hinterland of that which remains unspeakable — the absent presence, unmentioned but always overwhelmingly there and impossible to ignore — and argue that what is at play in both Eliot’s and Hill’s works is a reversal of focus, whereby the sacred can reside within the seemingly secular. I shall explore this mechanism of writing the sacred by testing it in tension with the secular as a primarily modernist technique.

Madeline Potter completed her PhD at the University of York in 2020, and is now a postdoctoral visiting research fellow at Edge Hill University, supported by the British Association for Romantic Studies and the British Association for Victorian Studies, working on a project entitled ‘Blood at Heaven’s Gate: Bram Stoker and John Keble’. This is part of her broader work on the theology of monstrous depictions in Irish Gothic literature during the nineteenth century, exploring fluidities between monstrosity and the sacred. She maintains an interest in modernist poetry.

Panel 4:

Wassim Rustom (University of Bergen)
‘Aestheticism, Materialism, and the Problem of Individuation’

This paper examines Walter Pater’s and Oscar Wilde’s aestheticism as philosophically informed by the rise of materialist discourses in the nineteenth century. This context casts in new light the Aesthetes’ controversial, often contrarian views on literature and art’s relations to the world. Pater and Wilde did not conceive their aestheticism as a flight from the world into a rarefied or transcendent aesthetic realm but as a response to a perceived threat, posed by historical developments and the rising tide of physical and human sciences. While an ascendant bourgeois culture promised to conform the world to its image, emergent understandings of physical, biological, historical, and social determinations appeared to contemporaries to preclude individual autonomy and the possibility of the “really new.” Neither Pater nor Wilde rejected these discourses in favor of an aesthetic alternative. Instead, they attempted to absorb them while safeguarding the possibility of individuation: as the novel and unique recombination of materials which the physical world, society, and history supply. Their aestheticism gave art the mission—heroic or modest—of proving the possibility of the new, in ways that continued to inform criticism and aesthetic theory in the twentieth century and down to the present.

Wassim Rustom is a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of Bergen. His thesis reframes questions about 'the use of literature' by examining how modern literary works (Romantic to modernist) reflect on the relation of means and ends. His first article, 'Wordsworth’s Causal Poetics of Thought', is forthcoming in Studies in Romanticism (2023). He is also currently developing a project on work and time in modernist writing.

Stefan Fisher-Høyrem (University of Agder)
‘Secular Time: A New Origin Story’

Scholars of modern secularisation invoking the term ‘secular time’ (Charles Taylor, Talal Asad, Richard Fenn, among many others) often refer to the term saeculum and its etymological origin in ideas of linear stretches of 'wordly' time, as opposed to the 'higher times' of divine eternity. Unfortunately, they tend to assign to secular time a range of properties that are contradictory and imprecise, while neglecting to describe how precisely to locate this kind of temporality in modernity. This paper presents central ideas from my forthcoming book Rethinking Secular Time where I am trying to offering a conceptual rather than etymological origin story of the saeculum beginning from scholastic angelology. In response to the question of what kind of time might measure the motion of angels—conceived as mobile yet immutable creatures—the scholastics conceptualized an isochronic, infinite and abstract time independent of motion. The conceptual relation between immutable mobiles and secular time enables us to be more precise about what kind of temporality secular time is (and not), and more accurately describe its mediations in modernity, thereby challenging this strand of secularisation narratives. 

Stefan Fisher-Høyrem is Senior Academic Librarian at the University of Agder, Norway. He holds a PhD in History from Oxford Brookes University (2012) and his research interests are located at the intersections between modern social and technological history, historiography and theories of history, secularity studies, and political theology. His co-edited volume Social Media and Social Order (with Prof. David Herbert) was published with de Gruyter in 2022, and his monograph Rethinking Secular Time in Victorian England, ca. 1830-1900 is forthcoming with Palgrave. https://stefanfisherhoyrem.wordpress.com/

Stuart McWilliams (University of Oslo)
“Secularities of Death”

The Latin saeculum, as a chronological phenomenon, is delimited by the projected deaths of those inhabiting it.  Moreover, the putative secularisation of the modern West is often framed in funereal terms (consider Time magazine’s infamous 1966 “Is God Dead?” cover and its Nietzschean heritage). How are secularity (as a condition) and secularisation (as a process) to be understood in relation to the passing of generations?

This paper will interrogate the morbid poetics of secular time, with particular reference to literary medievalism, political theology, and the intellectual traditions of the left.

Stuart McWilliams is Senior Lecturer in English Literature, American and British Studies at the University of Oslo. His research concerns temporality and historical poetics, especially in connection with discourses of enchantment and medievalism. His publications include the monograph Magical Thinking: History, Possibility, and the Idea of the Occult (Bloomsbury, 2013).

Panel 5

(Remote delegate panel: Zoom link TBA)

Joanna Rzepa (University of Essex)
Modernism and Theology: T. S. Eliot, John Middleton Murry, and the “Pure Poetry” Debate’

This paper discusses the interface between literary and theological modernisms. It considers the impact of the debates between modernist and neo-scholastic theologians on the literary criticism of the period. The specific focus of the paper is on the theoretical debate on ‘pure poetry’ that broke out in 1925. It was triggered by the modernist theologian and historian Henri Bremond’s lecture on ‘pure poetry’ delivered at the annual meeting of the Institut de France, and involved numerous literary critics and poets in France and the UK, including Paul Valéry, John Middleton Murry, Herbert Read, Wyndham Lewis, and T. S. Eliot. Both Eliot and Murry followed the work of Bremond and his most significant opponent, the neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain, and – as this paper demonstrates – Bremond’s and Maritain’s arguments stimulated the polemic between Eliot and Murry on the complex relationship of literature and religion. By analysing this debate, the paper contributes to the ongoing re-evaluation of the secularisation thesis and explores the theological roots of modernist aesthetics.

Joanna Rzepa is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. Prior to joining Essex, she held the post of Thomas Brown Assistant Professor at Trinity College Dublin, and taught at University College London and the University of Warwick. Her research has been published in Modernism/modernity, Comparative Critical Studies, and Translation Studies, and her monograph Modernist Poetry and Theology was published with Palgrave in 2021. Her research interests include modernism and twentieth-century literature, literature and religion, cultural and intellectual history, Holocaust writing, and literary translation.

Charles LaPorte (University of Washington)
‘Celebrating Eidh with Matthew Arnold: Daljit Nagra and Post-Secular Poetry’

This paper discusses how the twenty-first-century English poet Daljit Nagra reimagines Matthew Arnold’s classic poem of nineteenth-century secularization, “Dover Beach.” Nagra’s 2007 collection, “Look We Have Coming to Dover!” celebrates twenty-first-century Britain for its religious diversity, and indeed for a post-secularity that the intellectual prophets of the nineteenth-century (Arnold, Carlyle, Comte, Marx, Lewes, etc.) could neither predict nor envision. In this, Nagra represents a significant strain of twenty-first-century poetry. Religion has proven more resilient and flexible than Victorian secularists could have imagined. At the same time, poets like Nagra conceive of their art in ways that Arnold’s particular vein of secular thinking initiates and helps to build.

Charles LaPorte is Professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle.  His publications include Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible (Virginia, 2011) and The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2021).  He is presently co-editing with Mark Knight a special issue of MLQ entitled “Talking About Religion in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Literary Studies.”

Panel 6

(Remote delegate panel: Zoom link TBA)

Michael Dopffel (University of Bergen)
‘Defoe, Trust, and Spirits as “Matters of Fact”: The Eclipse of Simulated Transcendence’

Daniel Defoe’s fictions have long been considered at the epicenter of the rise of the realist novel. Due primarily to their quasi-empirical, ‘matter-of-fact’ portrayal of the ordinary and immanent, the “individual’s daily life” (Ian Watt), their secular nature is considered a necessary aspect of their success and as a prerequisite for the transplantation of the "mediation of spirituality” (Michael McKeon) from religious to fictional texts. Yet in line with the serpentine, contingent historical process of secularization narrated by Charles Taylor, one of Defoe’s earlier writings employs realism to adequately portray an extraordinary and transcendent ‘matter of fact’ with important theological and moral consequences. Emerging from a half century of empirical apparition narratives, Defoe’s A True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal (1706) is an example of the simulation of transcendent experiences through literary realism. Its success and eventual rejection suggest a more complex history of the literary secular than Watt surmised: involving the pitfalls of the period’s interlinking of metaphysics and empiricism, and the loss of trust in factual reports of the transcendence by readers, not by virtue of the supernaturalism but due to the commercial exploitation in the market place of faith and entertainment.

Michael Dopffel is an associate of the ‘Literature and Religion’ research group at the University of Bergen, Norway. He is part of the editorial team of Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana and has recently published his dissertation Empirical Form and Religious Function: Apparition Narratives of the Early English Enlightenment. His research interests include narratology, ecocriticism, colonial NA intellectual history, and the interrelation of early modern science, religion and literature.

Dirk Johannsen (University of Oslo)
‘Pietistic Atheism and the Nordic Modern Breakthrough: On a Narrative Culture of Secularity’

Following the influential Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough based on the Danish literary critic Georg Brandes' translation of the left Hegelian criticism of religion into a literary program, the paper discusses how religion was re-shaped to allow "the freethinker" to become the protagonist of a modern world. Here, secularity was substantiated as a cultural practice constitutive of modernity. The paper focuses on a major turning point in the understanding of secularity – connected to a reconfiguration of the notion of religion – triggered by the publication of J.P. Jacobsen’s novel Niels Lyhne (1880). A classic of atheistic literature, it portrays the psychological struggles involved in the transition from a tradition of faith to a modern secular society. Contextualizing the topos of the freethinker in the wider narrative culture triggered by the Modern Breakthrough, I discuss how narrative scripts substantiated the modern religious vs secular distinction.

Dirk Johannsen is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Oslo, Norway. His research focuses on narrative cultures, popular religion in the nineteenth century, literary formations of religion, cognitive approaches, and trolls.

Abstracts and biographies 

Panel 7

Hannah Zdansky (Belmont Abbey College)
‘Two Sides of the Same Coin: The Perceived Tension between the Religious and the Secular in Guy of Warwick’

To imagine medieval Western Christianity as a uniform monolith against which early modern thinkers developed a theory of the secular is to imagine wrongly, something both Michael Gillespie and Larry Siedentop acknowledge. Binaries are rarely, if ever, valuable categories by which to think. This is just as true when we study medieval literature. Despite the desire to classify texts as either religious or secular, many “secular” texts like romances find their home in manuscripts that contain a spectrum of works, from devotional lyrics to catechetical material and homiletic treatises to hagiography and even political satire. There are also romance characters who walk the line between being heroes and saints. One example is Guy of Warwick, whom I will discuss in this paper. He turns from a life of adventure to become a pilgrim and, later, a hermit. But he remains lay and never completely abandons his secular responsibilities. If we are to use the word “secular” here, though, we must do so in terms of its Medieval Latin basis—seculum—not as irreligious or profane, but as focused on the temporal, social world, though not to the exclusion of the eternal. What narratives such as Guy of Warwick’s show is the imbrication of the temporal and eternal, such that leading an active life of piety becomes an equally important option to a life of contemplation and prayer. And it is here, perhaps, that we get our first idea of what the secular is; but it is not “invented,” and neither does it exist in competition with religious ideology. Such literature, instead, answered a profound need among laypeople to accept and validate for themselves the significance and sanctity of their position.

Hannah Zdansky is an Assistant Professor of English at Belmont Abbey College, just outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame, specializing in English, French, and Celtic literatures. She has been a contributing member of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Working Group on Literature and Religion and has published in Religion & Literature as well as a number of other venues: https://nd.academia.edu/HannahZdansky.

Kevin Seidel (Eastern Mennonite University)
‘Religion and Literature: Exit, Border, Gap, Ecotone’

This paper (1) examines how a set of images—exit, border, gap, ecotone—describe the relationship between religion and literature as fields of study and (2) considers how each image shapes the way we understand secularity.

Kevin Seidel teaches a wide range of literature courses at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He also participates regularly in Scriptural Reasoning, a practice where Christians, Jews, and Muslims meet together to read one another’s scriptures. His book Rethinking the Secular Origins of the Novel: The Bible in English Fiction 1678–1767 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2021.

Panel 8

Vincent Pecora (University of Utah)
‘Jonah Without a Whale: Defoe and Conrad’

The Book of Jonah, among the shortest in scripture, is also marvelously bewildering. A prophet refuses his calling to Ninevah and becomes a willing scapegoat for his fellow sailors, who throw him overboard in a storm. He is rescued by a giant fish, accepts his shunned vocation, and then perplexingly resents God’s decision to spare the now repentant town. Two invocations of the tale stand out in terms of the secularizing trajectory of the English novel. The first is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, in which the hero is compared to Jonah early in the novel. The second is Joseph Conrad’s Nigger of the “Narcissus”, a tale overtly more secular, yet in some ways more faithful to the Book of Jonah, than is Robinson Crusoe. By Conrad’s era, a “Jonah” is not only a sailor jinxed by calamity. He is also any black sailor, who functions as “burden” on the ship. And yet, Conrad’s story suggests, Wait is somehow also a failed prophet, without saving grace. Why Conrad reanimates the Jonah story in his early novel is as perplexing as the story itself.

Vincent Pecora is the Gordon B. Hinckley Presidential Professor in British Studies at the University of Utah. He has taught previously at the University of Arkansas and the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Self and Form in Modern Narrative (1989), Households of the Soul (1997), Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity (2006), Secularization without End: Beckett, Mann, and Coetzee (2015), the editor of Nations and Identities: Classic Readings (2001), and a co-editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. His most recent book is Land and Literature in a Cosmopolitan Age (2020).

John Bolin (University of Exeter)
‘“By way of indirection”: Age of Iron, “Redemption”, and the “mystic”’

It would be hard to discuss Age of Iron without at least considering the notion of redemption. As far as the story of Elizabeth Curren is at the heart of the novel, her desire and the question that follows from that desire – ‘I want to be saved. How shall I be saved?’ – ask to be taken seriously (136). To be sure, Curren’s own text suggests her reader (in this case, her daughter) read her pleas with reserve; but even after we take into account her ‘liberal humanist posturing’, her ironic position as a late epistolary heroine, and the comic deflations introduced chiefly by Verceuil, the historical gravity of the situation and her impending death lend a seriousness to her desire. But in what sense might such a question of ‘salvation’ even make sense here? This paper considers some of the lesser-known contexts for the novel’s world: it demonstrates Coetzee’s engagement with Bataille, Rilke, and the ‘mystic.’

John Bolin’s first book is Beckett and the Modern Novel (Cambridge: 2013). He has recently published in The Review of English Studies, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and Modernism/modernity. His first novel, Three Pioneers, was printed by a…p Press (2017). He is Senior Lecturer in English at University of Exeter.

Panel 9

Henry Mead (Talinn University)
‘The Fall of the Fall in Literary Modernism’

Cultural modernism is marked by a motif of fallenness, a sense of lost unity preceding a current state of psychological and social division. Within a range of modernist responses to Christianity, two types of ‘fall’ are notable. The first borrowed the pattern of the Christian doctrine to describe versions of a historical fall shaping Europe's development, often within forms of secularised eschatology that merged politics with a vitalist or occult syncretism. The second, noting the doctrine’s gradual eclipse in modern thought, called for its revival in orthodox form. Literary modernism presents two conveniently close exemplars of each attitude: Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. The former is representative of many others working in a theosophical register; the latter of a network of thinkers reacting against liberal theology across Europe. Both Eliot and Pound eulogised the cultural unity of Europe in a previous age, a state of integration they felt, for different reasons, had been lost through the encroachments of modernity. Reviewing these attitudes, the paper seeks particularly to link Eliot's orthodoxy to recent theories of 'the invention of the secular'. It highlights the treatment of early modern history as a point of a disjuncture coinciding with the rise of the nation-state, the demise of a more plural medieval politics, and, as William Cavanaugh has put it, the ‘fall of the fall’. Finally, the paper asks whether accounts of a distinctly modern experience of temporality developed by Reinhard Koselleck and Francois Hartog might be usefully applied here.

Henry Mead’s research interests lie in modernist ideology, its roots in theological and political debate, and its legacy in current political thought. He has published book chapters and articles on forms of ‘political religion’ on the left and right, and analogous features of fin-de-siecle literature and art. His first monograph, T.E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism (Bloomsbury Academic 2015, pbk 2017) looks at anti-liberal currents in the Edwardian political and cultural avant-garde, tracing strands of libertarian and guild socialism, conservatism, and emergent fascism. He co-edited the 2014 collection Broadcasting in the Modernist Era (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), has recently published on Ezra Pound’s Canto 4 and Dora Marsden’s anarchism, and is working on a new book dealing the motif of Original Sin in modernist writing.

Andrea Rinaldi (University of Bergen)
‘“What is this Christianity?”: Western History, Catholic Heritage and Confucian Ethic in Ezra Pound’s Secular Religion’

The aim of my contribution is to present Ezra Pound’s long quest in search of a renewed western religion, by presenting an unpublished short essay, titled ‘What is this Christianity?’ and written probably in 1940. This text clarifies with unusual clarity how the poet looked at Christianity, and particularly at Catholicism, as the legitimate heir of the classic pagan tradition and, therefore, the custodian of the purest European faith. I will argue that this renewed European religion was, for Pound, the founding myth of a new Renaissance of the West, and that The Cantos were written for being the epic of this upcoming era.

Andrea Rinaldi studied late modern history at the University of Bologna and the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Foreign Languages of the University of Bergen, with a thesis on ‘Ezra Pound’s Political Religion’.

Panel 10

Martin Potter (University of York)
‘Poets Sacralising the Secular: David Jones, Les Murray, Michael Symmons Roberts’

After the invention of the secular as a cultural phenomenon, one of the possible responses on the part of religious artists is the embrace of the apparently secular together with an insistence, which may be encoded indirectly, as well as being declared plainly, that everything is ultimately sacred. At a theological and philosophical level, the ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ school exemplifies this reaction to the secular, that is, to deny there can be such a thing, and from the point of view of literature Catherine Pickstock’s proposal that language is, at its base, liturgical, is a particularly relevant strand in the school’s thinking. This presentation will argue that three Catholic poets – David Jones, Les Murray and Michael Symmons Roberts – share an attitude to language and culture consonant with Pickstock’s theory, and will discuss how an important aspect of each of them is their determination to find the sacred underlying the most apparently banal aspects of modern life. Examples will be adduced to show how they achieve this sacralisation of the apparently banal in their work, and to point out differences in their characteristic strategies.

Martin Potter is an associate of the University of York. His current research focuses particularly on David Jones, and on aesthetics. His book British and Catholic? National and Religious Identity in David Jones, Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark was published in 2013, and he has written a poetry pamphlet, In the Particular, published by Eyewear Publishing in 2017.

Eirik Fevang (University of Bergen)
‘Charles Péguy’s Paradoxical Spatiality in the Work of Charles Taylor and John Milbank’

In this project I explore the reception of Charles Péguy’s concept of space in the work of Charles Taylor and John Milbank in order illuminate aspects of the crucial differences between the two thinkers. For Péguy, “true” space, is the ever original and mysterious “now”, in which humans engage in a deadly struggle for the course of the future. But is Péguy’s space “secular” and “pluralistic” in the modern sense? Or is it rather the space for what Milbank calls “the contested universal”, the space where different conceptions of what is most universal, struggle to gain ground, and where one conception inevitably will temporarily triumph over the others in a continuous battle through time? Taylor and Milbank’s different interpretations of Péguy may help us to better understand the differences between their own philosophical stances regarding modernity and the secular space. Péguy for both thinkers represents a missed opportunity that could have renewed Christianity in the context of secular modernity. However, I will argue that while Taylor’s Péguy is “pluralistic”, Milbank sees Péguy as a “duellist”. For Milbank, Péguy’s space is the space in which a duel between Christendom and secular modernity reveals itself to remain the primary battle of the ages.

Keynote

Colin Jager (Rutgers University)
‘Secularism is a Theodicy: Coleridge, Melville, Hopkins’

The paper explores two complementary claims: that theodicy is evidence of secularization, and that secularism is a kind of theodicy. The first of these is not especially controversial. Theodicy is the attempt to explain (or justify) God, given the fact of evil or suffering in the world. It takes on its modern form in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a consequences of those changes we have come to call “modernity.” Chief among those changes, of course, is secularization. The second claim—that secularism is a theodicy—should be more surprising. It goes beyond merely asserting that secularism is “like religion.” Theodicies are attempts to reconcile us to the world as it is, to find larger meaning and purpose behind events that may initially appear random, disconnected, meaningless. In this talk I track that effort at (secular) reconciliation by way of three 19th-century works about the sea: briefly in Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner” and Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” and then at greater length in Hopkins’s “Wreck of the Deutschland.” All three suggest not only the failure of traditional Christian theodicy but the failure of the secular critique of theodicy—the failure, that is to say, of all theodicies.

Colin Jager is Professor of English and Director of the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University in the USA. A scholar of British Romanticism, religion, and secularism, Jager is the author of two academic monographs, both published by the University of Pennsylvania Press: The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (2007) and Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age (2015) and of articles on romanticism, religion, cognitive science and other topics, published in MLQ, ELH, Public Culture, Qui Parle, and elsewhere. At Rutgers, he regularly teaches courses on poetry and poetics, secularism, religion, literary theory, and romantic literature.  In fall 2018 he was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Lancaster University in England.  He is at work on two projects: the first is on Romanticism and political possibility; the second is on aesthetics and religion, with the working title On Not Being Reconciled: Literature, Religion, and Selfhood.

Panel 11

Rebekah Lamb (University of St Andrews)
‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Aesthetics and the Problem of the Secular’

This paper examines Dante Gabriel Rossetti's later Victorian poetry, with a view to the degree to which he adopted liturgical modes of measuring time for a secularized and highly private aesthetic. Special emphasis will be placed on his sonnet sequences found in The House of Life (1881) but consideration of his (pertinent) paintings and double works of art will also be made. Overall, this paper argues that Rossetti's (re)turn to revisions of his poetic visions models the "return of the same" which, as Nietzsche and Benjamin note, characterises the concept of time and aesthetics in late modernity's emergent, secular age. In so doing, it will also ask whether any visionary, poetic model can be truly secular.

Rebekah Lamb is a Lecturer in Theology and the Arts in the School of Divinity at the University of St Andrews. She specializes in Religion and Literature from the long nineteenth century to the present. She is completing her first book, on the relationship between theology, boredom, and aesthetics in late modernity, with McGill-Queens University Press. She has published in The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, Religions, New Blackfriars, The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing, Theology in Scotland, Church Life Journal and elsewhere. She is currently collaborating on the Cambridge Companion to Gerard Manley Hopkins in Context and co-editing a special issue on John Henry Newman for Religion and Literature. She also serves as a Trustee of the Christian Heritage Centre (CHC) at Stonyhurst and recently co-founded the St Margaret of Scotland Lecture Series at the University of St Andrews.

Sally Jones (Northwestern Polytechnic, Alberta, Canada)
‘Reconsidering Edith Wharton: Assumptions of Secularity’

For more than a century, the criticism of Edith Wharton’s work has been overwhelmingly secular, despite the rich store of significant religious elements in Wharton’s work. Considering Wharton’s use of many religious titles, allusions, and themes, in addition to her depictions of supernatural encounters, afterlife experiences, and moral quandaries, this lack of critical attention over the course of 120 years demands explanation. Wharton’s own posturing among secular intellectuals and her enthusiastic response to “the wonder world of science” contributed to the process by which it became a critical commonplace to consider her work almost exclusively in secular terms. However, removing the presumption that Wharton’s reading in science precludes further analysis of the religious aspects of her work can release Wharton scholarship from confining ways of thinking about her works, and stimulate more supple engagements with the rich themes that exist “beyond” the social realism of her writing. In order to reopen the conversation about Wharton’s relationship to secularity, I trace how biographical assumptions have been reiterated to reinforce the common secularization narrative. This case study invigorates new conversations about the reach of Wharton’s work and recovers a lifelong engagement with religion that underpins her social and moral concerns.

Sally Jones (PhD University of Aberdeen) is Professor of English at Northwestern Polytechnic in Alberta, Canada. She teaches courses in American and Canadian literature, British Victorian literature, and Detective Fiction. Her research interests explore the intersection of religious and cultural studies, particularly in G. K. Chesterton and Edith Wharton’s works. Her current book project investigates the largely overlooked significance of Wharton’s religious beliefs underpinning her social and moral concerns.

Panel 12

Alastair Minnis (Yale University)
‘Marriage After Aristotle: Late-medieval Secularization of the Marital Estate’

The impact of the rediscovered Aristotle on late-medieval thought was immense. It was a major driving force for secularism, though some (including Charles Taylor) seem unaware of its importance. I shall investigate the moves made by three scholars of Aristotelian ‘practical philosophy’, Giles of Rome (d.1316), Nicole Oresme (d.1382) and Evrart de Conty (d.1405), towards a secular rationalization of marriage. ‘The Middle Ages left no theologically informed accounts of married life: nothing comparable to the theologically informed accounts of monastic life’ (to quote P.R. Reynolds). ‘Courtly love’ afforded a fresh way of valuing heterosexual love, but took no special interest in marriage; indeed, one proponent claimed that true love and marriage were incompatible. Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, together with the pseudo-Aristotelian Economics (on family management), opened up new possibilities. He enabled a model of marriage wherein true love functions in a symbiotic relationship with effective household management. There is a distinct secularizing move in the assertion that a good marriage has great economic advantages; a good wife is a co-partner in a successful business. People of secular estate are presented with a positive valuation of matrimony, of a kind that ‘theologically informed accounts of married life’ did not provide.

Alastair Minnis is Douglas Tracy Smith Emeritus Professor of English, Yale University.

Elizabeth Robertson (University of Glasgow)
‘Wilful Griselda: Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale, Voluntarism, and the Secularization of the Female Subject’

Mary Wollstonecraft begins her vindication of the rights of women, a treatise so important to the development of the status of women in the secular sphere, by claiming paradoxically that their rights depend on the presence within them of an entity that comes from the religious sphere, the soul. The idea that the female soul was inviolable and precious was formulated early in Catholicism in Augustine’s subtle commentary on the indiscernibility of Lucrece’s consent in the story of her rape, but it is not until the thirteenth century that the resiliency of female consent is affirmed in the public sphere through the doctrine of consent to marriage. On the basis of this doctrine, women—particularly aristocratic and gentry women—were able to justify their freely willed choice of marriage partner even if that choice went against the desires of the lord, the guardian or even the king.  The Catholic Church, so often guilty of promulgating the erasure of women’s voices in the public sphere, here affirmed women’s legal agency in both the ecclesiastical and secular courtroom.  It is voluntarism, however, in asserting the primacy of the faculty of will over reason in the operations of the soul, that seized on choice (or even the choice not to choose) as a fundamental activity of free will and the basis of the integrity of the individual person.  A move away from an intellectualist model to a voluntarist model of the soul opens the possibilities for the affirmation of the legitimacy of the choices of women of any class and of any kind of education.

In one of his most problematic tales, The Clerk’s Tale, I shall argue in this paper, Chaucer demonstrates the complexity of this late medieval voluntarist understanding of the ineffable yet efficacious power of the will that is manifest in acts of consent.  When we acknowledge the role the affirmation of her own will plays in the tale’s heroine Griselda’s behavior, we can see that the power in the tale resides not with the domestic tyrant, Walter, but rather with Griselda, a peasant, who, like the Virgin Mary with whom she is compared, repeatedly manifests the radical and transformative power of her adherence to her own will.  Drawing on voluntarist ideas about the integrity of the person exhibited in the inviolability, resilience and absolute autonomy of the will, Chaucer transforms the apparently pitiable and victimized heroine of his Petrarchan source from a Christian heroine who demonstrates exemplary patience into a fully discerning subject, that is, in Paul Smith’s understanding of the word discernment, a resistant subject who has the power to unravel tyranny in the secular sphere.

Elizabeth Robertson is a professor emerita and honorary research fellow at the University of Glasgow.  Co-founder of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, she has published a monograph on the Ancrene Wisse and over fifty essays in journals and collections of essays including in Studies in the Age of Chaucer and Speculum. Her primary research interests are in gender and religion, literary form, the representation of the soul, and the senses in Middle English literature. She has co-edited Piers Plowman, the Katherine Group, and three volumes of essays. She has just completed a draft of a monograph which she hopes to publish soon : Chaucerian Consent: Women, Religion and Subjection in Late Medieval England.  She is also just now completing an edition on Literature  and the Senses for OUP, the result of her five year collaborative study of the Senses in Medieval Literature. 

Panel 13

Matthew Mutter (Bard College)
‘The Ambiguous Secularism of Modernist Social Science’

This paper will explore the alternately secular and religious meanings of the social sciences for the literary modernists. The modernist fascination with the work of anthropologists like James Frazer and Jane Harrison has been taken, persuasively, as a story of re-enchantment and of an interest in ‘irrational’ feelings. But while these new studies seemed to document the persistence of myth and an original intimacy between art and religious ritual, the explanatory paradigms of social science were insidiously secularizing forces. Using the career of T.S. Eliot as a model, I will suggest that the contours of the modernist encounter with social science help us understand the appeal and the limitations of the secular imaginary. The influence of early psychology of religion is manifest in Eliot’s earliest poetry, yet his graduate essays begin to register a hesitation about the “confusion between description and interpretation” in social scientific argument. In his mature work the ambivalence persists: he becomes a practicing sociologist of “culture” while simultaneously developing a critique of the functionalist social-scientific lexicon of “interests,” “equilibria,” and “behavior.” 

Matthew Mutter (mmutter@bard.edu) is Associate Professor of Literature at Bard College. His first book, Restless Secularism: Modernism and the Religious Inheritance (Yale University Press), was published 2017. His current book project explores the resistance of certain American novelists and poets to the burgeoning cultural authority of the social sciences in the twentieth century while examining the broader theoretical problems at the intersection of humanistic and social-scientific knowledge.

Suzanne Hobson (Queen Mary University of London)
‘“Rationalists in Literature”: Unbelief and (non)-Modernist Fiction between the Wars’

This paper examines the connections between literary networks and organised Secularist groups such as the Rationalist Press Association and the National Secular Society in the 1920s and 30s. The standard account of ‘the secular’ in literature of the period presents modernism as the locus and origin of a ‘secular sacred’ in which religious questions are sublimated into questions of form (Pericles Lewis, Stephen Kern). But this overlooks the existence of writers who engaged more openly with questions of belief and disbelief in the period, many of whose works, I suggest, sit awkwardly within or alongside ‘modernist’ texts for that reason. Key among this group were individuals such as H.G. Wells and D.H. Lawrence who were frequently identified by the Secularist press as of particular interest to their readers. Wells, together with Vernon Lee and Naomi Mitchison, were members of and associates of Secularist movements and appeared in print in Secularist journals or contributed to book series. Also significant in this context are a group of writers referred to at the time as ‘Rationalists in literature’, but since largely forgotten including Ivan Naschiwin and K.S. Bhat whose journal, Soma, seems to be as close as any literary publication ever came to an express Secularist agenda. This paper offers an introduction to the literature of unbelief in the period and asks how a focus on this writing might challenge the centrality of modernism as the characteristic literary practice of a purportedly ‘secular age’ as well as suggest the influence of modernist practices and sensibilities on the way we have later come to understand that age.

Suzanne Hobson is Reader in 20th Century Literature in the English Department of Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Unbelief in Interwar Fiction: Doubting Moderns (2022), Angels of Modernism: Religion, Culture, Aesthetics 1910-60 (2011) and the co-editor with Rachel Potter of The Salt Companion to Mina Loy. She is a former chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies.

Panel 14

John-Wilhelm Flattun (University of Bergen)
‘Thomas Middleton’s Performative Laws: Towards a Secular Theology’

The transition from medieval to early modern past the Reformation saw a secularising the law by way of imaginative construction of the belief in the divine power of a secular law, the theology of justice in a similar ritualistic, social, and performative manner. For the playwright Thomas Middleton (1580-1627), law was thought of as the perfect order and reason upon which a modern society should be built, in numerous plays he challenged the relationship between the purity and politics of law. A generation after Shakespeare, this “imperfect vehicle” and “unreachable ideal” are still central for Middleton, who sees the nature of law as the most perfect order. Since the ideal law is derived from God and cannot be flawed, it is the people who read, interpret, and execute the law that are flawed. Throughout most of his writings, the theme of divine justice is an almost religious approach to law, and a search for truth and the purity of order is evident. How was this secularisation of the divine law, “the very image of justice” presented as “an imperfect vehicle in an imperfect world” (Cormack et al., 2013, 3)? How are tensions between religious and secular languages staged?

John-Wilhelm Flattun is research librarian at the University library of Bergen. As an art historian his research focuses on late medieval visual culture, political and religious propaganda. His literary research concentrates on Jacobean law and theology on the theatre stage. His current project is on Thomas Middleton’s revenge tragedies and political theology.

Gweno Williams (University of York)
‘Was Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-73) the First Published Secular Woman Writer in English?’

As an early modernist, teaching and developing the teaching of rediscovered early modern women’s writing has been a career highlight. One immediate challenge however, has been the heavy weighting of many female-authored recovered texts towards religion, which can appear very remote from the interests of contemporary undergraduates.

By contrast, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-73) stands out as a remarkable and appealing example of a prolific early modern woman writer preoccupied with secular topics, (although the term secular has not been widely applied to her). The secular focus of her writings is an interesting contrast with her Anglican upbringing followed by significant exposure to Catholicism through influential figures such as Queen Henrietta Maria, her own husband William Cavendish and years of exile in Catholic Europe.

This paper seeks to explore Cavendish’s unique stance as a writer by teasing out some of her explicit and implicit responses to expectations around early women writers. Potential connections between Cavendish’s consistent secular focus in multiple genres and her contemporaries’ persistent labelling of her as ‘mad’ or ‘ridiculous’ are particularly interesting. Her self-articulated ‘singularity’ and published desire for ‘a Glorious Fame’ appear remarkably modern.  Finally, Cavendish’s invocation of an appreciative future readership in ‘Future Ages’ suggests an author thinking beyond the conventional expectations and constraints of her time. 

Gweno Williams teaches literature, drama and pedagogy at the Norwegian Study Centre, University of York. She is Professor Emeritus at York St John University, where she taught English literature for many years, and one of the very first British National Teaching Fellows (2002). Her early modern research specialism is the plays of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-73); her pioneering DVD of Cavendish’s plays won an international award. She is past President of the International Margaret Cavendish Society. She has been involved with theatre, particularly the York Mystery Plays in a variety of roles, throughout her academic career.

Panel 15

Fionnuala O’Neill Tonning (University of Bergen)
‘Christ as Tragic Hero: Sixteenth-Century Neo-Latin Passion and Resurrection Plays’

Genealogies of secularization usually identify the Reformation as a significant catalyst for the emergence of the modern, secularized world, although they differ considerably over the exact trajectory which followed. How did literature and drama of the Reformation era start to pave the way for literary spaces in which the secular might later begin to be imagined and constructed? In this paper I explore a new genre which emerged in the sixteenth century under the influence of Renaissance humanism: neo-Latin sacred tragedy. Far from being an obvious path to literary secularization, the humanist writers who experimented with writing classical tragedy based on Biblical events sought to sacralize this ancient genre, improving upon pagan classical exemplar through the superiority of their Christian subject matter. Exploring plays based upon the Gospel narratives of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection, this paper will show how early experiments in the genre by Catholic writers, which present Christ as a tragic hero, are influenced as much by late medieval sacred drama and crucifixion piety as by the conventions of classical tragedy. Comparing these with subsequent experiments, by Reformed writers, it becomes clear that Protestant dramatists seem significantly less comfortable with staging the crucifixion as a tragedy, favouring tragicomedy over tragedy and Resurrection plays over Passion plays. However, their marked scepticism towards an overly tragic, fleshly and humanised Christ is driven not by ‘disenchantment’ but by a competing theological impetus that mistrusts the alluring immediacy of the gaze and visuality, turning instead to the Word and its eschatological promises. On both sides of the confessional divide, then, experiments that today may well be retrospectively construed as secularizing arose out of highly specific Christological debates conducted through innovative dramatic form.

Fionnuala O’Neill Tonning is a Senior Teaching Fellow in English Literature at the University of Bergen, Norway, and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, hosted by the School of Divinity and the Scottish Network for Religion and Literature. She received her PhD from the department of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She has published a number of books and articles on Shakespeare and other early modern drama, and together with Erik Tonning and Jolyon Mitchell recently co-edited The Transformations of Tragedy: Christian Influences Early Modern to Modern (Brill, 2019). She is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled Theatre and Iconoclasm: Image Reform and Drama in Early Modern England c. 1508-1631.

Alison Shell (University College London)
‘Soul of the age!’: Jonson’s and Milton’s tributes to Shakespeare

This paper examines early modern meanings of the word ‘secular’, and reads Ben Jonson’s and John Milton’s well-known seventeenth-century tributes to Shakespeare in the light of these. At the time both poets were writing, ‘secular’ could be used neutrally to connote different spheres and different remits; yet it was also linked to words like ‘profane’ and ‘carnal’, pointing towards a fear of worldliness and a suspicion that paying attention to the world might displace sacred concerns. Another common contemporary meaning, ‘of, or belonging to, an age or a long period’ – deriving from saeculum, the Latin for ‘generation’ – is played upon by Jonson in his poetic tribute to Shakespeare, published in the First Folio. Jonson's poem consigns its subject to a secular immortality in which poets live on in their books, and their books come to stand for them: a rhetorical gambit which characterises other posthumous tributes to Shakespeare, and to many writers in this era. Yet it was by no means universal – and in a Christian culture, at a time when questions of the soul's destination were so fervently debated, it was a vulnerable imaginative stance to take. Milton recognised this when, in his tribute to Shakespeare and elsewhere, he hints at God being supplanted by his creature, foreshadowing ideas of bardolatry. 

Alison Shell is Professor of Early Modern Studies in the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London, and the author of Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558-1660 (1999), Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (2007) and Shakespeare and Religion (2010), as well as several articles and book chapters on topics relating to English literature and religion between the Reformation and the 20th century. With Judith Maltby, she co-edited Anglican Women Novelists (2019). Between 2018 and 2022 she held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, during which she worked on British Counter-Reformation drama. 

Panel 16

James Williams (University of York)
‘Wilderness is Paradise: FitzGerald, Omar, and Secular Persianism’

This paper considers two of Edward FitzGerald’s (1809-1883) most important relationships: with the Persian “Astronomer-Poet” Omar Khayyam (1048-1131), and with the Persian language as such. These were obviously intertwined but each was, for FitzGerald, inseparable from the problem of finding a poetic language for his secular atheism. FitzGerald’s Omar, as depicted in Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859), is a materialist epicurean at a time when some Orientalists made claims for him as a Sufi mystic. FitzGerald’s insistence on this point speaks of a desire to create a composite persona (he wrote of his “Fitz-Omar name”) that was both Omar and himself, and neither—in which critique of Islam could both disguise and vocalize critique of Christianity, always with the plausible deniability afforded by an alter ego. The Persian language was, in the nineteenth century as today, caught between two focuses of interest: the Islamic (learnt alongside Arabic and Turkish) and the Indo-European (learnt alongside Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit). My paper argues for the value—even necessity—to the atheist FitzGerald, not only of the double identity “Fitz-Omar”, but of this doubleness built into the Persian language, to which end I will also consider his translations from Jami and Attar.

James Williams is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of York. His publications include Edward Lear (Northcote House, 2018), The Edinburgh Companion to Nonsense (co-edited with Anna Barton, Edinburgh UP, 2021), Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry (co-edited with Matthew Bevis, OUP, 2016), and the introduction and notes to Alice Goodman, History is Our Mother: Three Libretti (NYRB Classics, 2017).

Winter Jade Werner (Wheaton College)
‘The Hikyat Abdullah and the Missionary Press: Cosmopolitan Religiosity in Colonial Melaka’

As scholars such as Talal Asad have forcefully demonstrated, the emergence of the “secular” is inextricable from the practices and institutions of colonialism. I bring to this vein of inquiry an interest in religious encounters in Southeast Asia, focusing in particular on Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir’s The Hikayat Abdullah (1849), a work considered by some to be “a true expression of Islamic ideals” (Carroll 1999), which nevertheless was written at the urging of a London Missionary Society missionary and was published by a Protestant missionary press. Though it recounts historical political events in British-held Melaka and Singapore, the Hikayat Abdullah is fundamentally a meditation on morality under colonial conditions and the ways this morality hinges on the teaching and learning of language. Examining the material circumstances of the missionary press in relation to Kadir’s “moral perorations” (Hill 1970), I suggest that this linguistically-savvy, religiously-hybrid text tries to imagine an alternative to “secular” British political tolerance (as advanced, for instance, by the East India Company) by way of a capacious religious universalism in melding the hikayat (the Malaysian historical romance) and Protestant autobiographical forms.

Winter Jade Werner is Associate Professor of English at Wheaton College. She is the author of Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (The Ohio State University Press, 2020) and co-editor (with Joshua King) of Constructing Nineteenth-Century Religion: Literary, HIstorical, and Religious Studies in Dialogue (The Ohio State University Press, 2019). Her essays have been published or are forthcoming in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Dickens Studies Annual, Romantic Circles, MLQ, and elsewhere, and her current project explores how foreign missionary presses helped consolidate the nineteenth-century category of "world literature." 

Keynote

Emma Mason (University of Warwick)
‘Kenosis and the Ecological Thought in Nineteenth-Century Poetry’

This paper argues for the theological notion of kenosis as a pivot for the articulation of ecological thought in nineteenth-century Britain. I suggest that nineteenth-century ecological discourse is partially shaped by the Christian poetics of writers who sought to revive kenosis as at once theologically and politically key to the religious argument for species equality (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Rossetti, Hopkins). In its articulation of Christ’s renunciation or emptying of his divine will to become entirely receptive to God’s will, kenosis incarnated a model of relationship, receptivity, and hospitality that was absent from both nineteenth-century theological and scientific debate. The parallel drivers of the Catholic Revival and debate over the status of the nonhuman created a public space in which many felt violently divided, fearful of the consequences of change in their views of both God and the natural world. As a counter to these divisions, kenosis offered a mode of receptive or ‘weak’ thought that was given expression in poetic form. In tracing kenosis via nineteenth-century poetry, this paper spotlights the importance of Christian thought to ecology and the potential of weak thinking for current political debate.

Emma Mason is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her publications include Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Elizabeth Jennings: The Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2012), and is editor of Reading the Abrahamic Faiths (Bloomsbury, 2015). She co-authored Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature (Oxford University Press, 2006) with Mark Knight, with whom she is also series editor of Bloomsbury’s ‘New Directions in Religion and Literature’.

Panel 17

(Remote delegate panel: Zoom link TBA)

Sebastian Lecourt (University of Houston)
‘Secularism and the Anthology’

If secularization entails the abstraction of religion into a human universal, then one role that literature has played in this process has been to help writers reshape different textual traditions to make them appear similar. Modern comparative religion has its own canon of literary forms that it uses to highlight the supposedly universal features of religion. My paper explores one such form: the world religion “digest,” which boils different global traditions down to comparable lists of wise sayings. I trace the genesis of this comparative form in nineteenth-century publishing and argue that from the start it presented two competing visions of secularism – prosaic and poetic, liberal and aesthetic. On the one hand, digests like Moncure Conway’s The Sacred Anthology (1875) sought to present different religious traditions as articulators of the same perennial ethical philosophy. On the other hand, digests like Charles Mills’s Pebbles, Pearls and Gems of the Orient (1882) presented readers with gnomic fragments that were memorable for their exotic local color. The first tradition originated in global Unitarian activism and offers a kind of liberal secularism that sees behind religion a kind of perennial human moral philosophy. The second originated in popular Orientalist publishing and represents a kind of aesthetic secularism that checks universalism with a spectacle of difference.

Sebastian Lecourt is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston. His research focuses on Victorian literature and questions of secularization, colonialism, and comparativism. He is the author of Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination (Oxford, 2018) and his essays have appeared in PMLA, Representations, Victorian Studies, ELH, and Victorian Literature and Culture. He is currently working on a book project entitled The Genres of Comparative Religion, 1783-1927.

Ryan McDermott (University of Pittsburgh)
‘Four Kinds of Genealogy, Modern and Medieval: Legal, Critical, Phylogenetic, Consanguineous’

This paper compares the phylogenetic methods of evolutionary biology to two kinds of genealogical method commonly employed in literary and religious history, and proposes that a medieval analogue to phylogenetic method is especially attuned to the challenges of genealogies of modernity. One kind of genealogical method, which analogously derives from inheritance law, seeks to establish a lineage of proximity and causation. By contrast, critical genealogy, associated with Nietzsche and Foucault, eschews the search for origins and instead unveils the contingency of all historical phenomena. Current phylogenetic theory affirms both of these intuitions and is capable of thinking them together. After exploring this analogy, I turn to a medieval model of genealogical thinking, the "tree of consanguinity," which, like phylogenetic theory, is capable of finding and disavowing origins at the same time. These medieval diagrams travel with glosses that encourage the reader to imagine the tree in motion. I am working with an animator to bring this dynamic imagination to life, in order to help my audience visualize how genetically related phenomena can pass into and out of significant relationship. I conclude that would-be genealogists of modernity should attend to the affordances and limitations of each of these genealogical analogies.

Ryan McDermott is associate professor of medieval literature and culture in the Department of English, University of Pittsburgh, USA. He directs the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded Genealogies of Modernity Project (www.genealogiesofmodernity.org).  

Panel 18

(Remote delegate panel: Zoom link TBA)

Regina Schwartz (Northwestern University)
‘Sacramental Poetics’

The invention of the secular includes the adoption of formerly religious concerns to new forms, spaces, and under new rubrics. This paper explores the continuity between the sacred and the secular, and argues that their separation, indeed, their differences, are often overdrawn.

Regina Schwartz is Professor of Literature and Religion at Northwestern University. She is the author of Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism; Loving Justice, Living Shakespeare; The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism; and Remembering and Repeating: On Milton's Theology and Poetics.  A collection of essays, On Sacramental Poetics, is forthcoming with Notre Dame Press. 

Anna Svendsen (Franciscan University of Steubenville)
‘David Jones on Liturgy and the Limitations of Form in the Modern Saecula’

In 1941, David Jones wrote an article in The Tablet called “Epoch, Church and Artist” (later “Religion and the Muses”) in which he discusses the peculiar challenges of the 20th c. artist to make objects for Catholic devotional and liturgical purposes. Jones contrasts the “corporate” and “symbolic” needs of art for the purposes of the Church with the “characteristic bents and virtues of modern painting,” which he sees as inescapably “experimental” and “private.” This opposition of “epoch,” “church,” and “artist” in some sense accounts for the fact that Jones’s own painting and poetry has constant recourse to Catholic liturgical forms and language, and yet is still “secular” in that very little of it was made expressly “for the sanctuary.” Gesturing towards the conference’s larger treatment of “inventing the secular,” this paper will investigate some of Jones’s assumptions that underlie the unusual tension between sacred and secular embodied in his distinctively 20th c. style.

Anna Svendsen, Ph.D., is a researcher and university instructor based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. She has most recently published on the influence of the Jesuit theologian C.C. Martindale in the work of David Jones and previously on the theological questions raised by Jones's work. She is the Associate Director of the David Jones Research Center in Maryland, USA, and co-organizes the David Jones Digital Archive, a digital humanities project overseen by the Center.