Afterword: Writing Religion and the Genealogy of the Literary Aesthetic

Abstract

This afterword takes as its starting-point the suggestion that the category of the 'literary' might be implicated within a historical process of secularisation. This possibility is resisted, at least in respect of its applicability to the influential circle of eighteenth-century clerical literati associated with Bishop William Warburton, who ranged themselves against the growing influence of the third earl of Shaftesbury and his followers, for reasons that could be construed as at once matters of orthodoxy and questions of taste. In doing so, they helped to form 'pre-Romantic' cultural prejudices while simultaneously defending the interests of the eighteenth-century Church.'Writing Religion' contributes to a larger revival of interest in the relationship between religion and literature across a wide range of historical fields; in doing so, it also demonstrates the healthy methodological pluralism with which this development has been greeted by students of eighteenth-century Britain. Historiographies of the book, of reading practices and of authorship have undoubtedly encouraged literary scholars of this period to understand their own traditional area of study as embedded within a far richer and more various field of textual production and consumption, in which religious writers, publishers and audiences played a particularly prominent role. The extraordinary proliferation of printed media across the century has often been understood in narrowly socio-economic terms, as a function of progressive commercialisation. Yet, as several of these articles make clear, the birth of a consumer society did not preclude other forms of imagined (religious) community, whether deriving from nonconformist tradition, evangelical communications networks or the armed Christian nation invoked by fast sermons of the 1790s. Just as importantly, however, the present volume also suggests that some form of recognisably 'literary' interpretative procedure might legitimately be brought to bear on a somewhat broader range of eighteenth-century religious texts than has sometimes been assumed. Scholars of an earlier 'post-Reformation' period have generally proved more willing to pursue rhetorical and generic studies of religious writings ranging from private meditation and theological treatise to sermon literature and polemical divinity. The relative paucity of such work in eighteenth-century studies arguably betrays long-standing assumptions concerning the increasingly 'prosaic' and worldly tendencies of Christian belief, a spiritual condition for which the urbane neoclassical culture of ' Augustan' England has traditionally offered an all too appropriate pendant.Despite variations of approach and subject matter, therefore, the contributors to this volume do much to vindicate the editors' claim that the closer integration of literary and religious studies offers a significant challenge to long-standing assumptions concerning the progressive secularisation of British culture and society in the decades