Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination

The book's account of the secularizing of cultural affliations and passions into a many-sidedness that recognizes multiple inheritances promises new forms of political life where politics seems most fractured. Yet because for Eliot race and religion can only help to cultivate a self if they are...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Victorian studies 2019-06, Vol.61 (4), p.682-684
Main Author: Neill, Anna
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
19th century
Aesthetics
Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888)
Cultural differences
Culture
Darwin, Charles (1809-1882)
Inheritances
Interiority
Liberalism
Nonfiction
Pater, Walter (1839-1894)
Philology
Politics
Race
Religion
Secularism
Smith, Adam (1723-1790)
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Summary:The book's account of the secularizing of cultural affliations and passions into a many-sidedness that recognizes multiple inheritances promises new forms of political life where politics seems most fractured. Yet because for Eliot race and religion can only help to cultivate a self if they are absorbed through the acts of reading and interpreting scripture, many-sidedness risks being pushed back into Protestant contemplative interiority. In so doing, he shows how the monogenetic emphasis on religion, and in particular on Protestant evangelism, with its faith in the "common human capacity for spiritual interiority," intersected with a more deterministic account of religion in the philological and ethnological studies of cultural differences and traditions (29).
ISSN:0042-5222
1527-2052
DOI:10.2979/victorianstudies.61.4.19