Religion, The Novel, and the Public Sphere

Catalog description

How does religion organize identity and community? Who does it include and exclude from the sense of community that it creates? What happens when its power to organize identity intersects with racism, sectarian ideology, and colonialism? The modern world is often characterized as disjointed, and even secular philosophers and literary critics often agree in their tendency to contrast this chaos with a time in which religion made things feel more stable. We will interrogate this assumption about the stabilizing powers of religion in the cultural context of nineteenth through twenty-first century Britain and its empire. We will think through how this idea of religion appears in its interrelated domestic and colonial contexts, and how it continues to impact the public sphere across the world today. Authors studied will include Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Chinua Achebe, and Zadie Smith.