What constitutes reading? This is the question William McKelvy asks in
The English Cult of Literature. Is it a theory of interpretation or a
physical activity, a process determined by hermeneutic destiny or by
paper, ink, hands, and eyes? McKelvy seeks to transform the
nineteenth-century field of "Religion and Literature" into "Reading and
Religion," emphasizing both the material and the institutional contexts
for each. In doing so, he hopes to recover the ways in which modern
literary authority developed in dialogue with a politically reconfigured
religious authority.The received wisdom has been that England's literary
tradition was modernity's most promising religion because the
established forms of Christianity, wounded in the Enlightenment,
inevitably gave up their hold on the imagination and on the political
sphere. Through a series of case studies and analysis of a diverse range
of writing, this work gives life to a very different story, one that
shows literature assuming a religious vocation in concert with an
increasingly unencumbered freedom of religious confession and the making
of a reading nation. In the process the author shifts attention away
from the idea of the literary critic in favor of considering the
historic role of religious professionals in shaping and contesting the
authority of print.Indebted to recent findings of book history and newer
historiographies at odds with conventional secularization theory, this
work makes an interdisciplinary contribution to revising the existing
models for understanding change in Britain during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.
