Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion and Literature (Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700–2000)

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Hardcover
2016
$105.46

Nineteenth-Century British Secularism offers a new paradigm for understanding secularization in the nineteenth century. It addresses the crisis in the secularization thesis by foregrounding a nineteenth-century development called 'Secularism' - the particular movement and creed founded by George Jacob Holyoake from 1851 to 1852. Nineteenth-Century British Secularism rethinks and reevaluates the significance of Holyoake's Secularism, regarding it as a historic moment of modernity and granting it centrality as both a herald and exemplar for a new understanding of modern secularity. In addition to Secularism proper, the book treats several other moments of secular emergence in the nineteenth century, including Thomas Carlyle's 'natural supernaturalism', Richard Carlile's anti-theist science advocacy, Charles Lyell's uniformity principle in geology, Francis Newman's naturalized religion or 'primitive Christianity', and George Eliot's secularism and post-secularism.

Synopsis

Nineteenth-Century British Secularism offers a new paradigm for understanding secularization in the nineteenth century. It addresses the crisis in the secularization thesis by foregrounding a nineteenth-century development called 'Secularism' - the particular movement and creed founded by George Jacob Holyoake from 1851 to 1852. Nineteenth-Century British Secularism rethinks and reevaluates the significance of Holyoake's Secularism, regarding it as a historic moment of modernity and granting it centrality as both a herald and exemplar for a new understanding of modern secularity. In addition to Secularism proper, the book treats several other moments of secular emergence in the nineteenth century, including Thomas Carlyle's 'natural supernaturalism', Richard Carlile's anti-theist science advocacy, Charles Lyell's uniformity principle in geology, Francis Newman's naturalized religion or 'primitive Christianity', and George Eliot's secularism and post-secularism.

$105.46

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 264
Edition: 1st ed. 2016
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 17 Feb 2016
ISBN 10: 1137463880
ISBN 13: 9781137463883
Book Overview: Michael Rectenwald's Nineteenth-Century British Secularism is an impressively lucid, balanced, and wide-ranging engagement with the implications of recent challenges to both modern secularism and the secularisation thesis for our understanding of Victorian literature and culture. Placing the often-overlooked organised Secularist movement at the centre of the narrative enables Rectenwald to advance us beyond critical cliches about Victorian doubt and a 'crisis of faith' and to do justice to the prescience and complexity of Victorian thinking about the concepts of secularism and secularisation. (Sara Lyons, Lecturer in Victorian Literature, University of Kent, UK and author of Algernon Swinburne and Walter Pater: Victorian Aestheticism, Doubt and Secularisation (2015))

Author Bio

Michael Rectenwald is Professor of Global Liberal Studies at New York University, USA. He is editor of Global Secularisms in A Post-Secular Age (2015) and Academic Writing, Real World Topics (2015). He has published essays on secularism in The British Journal for the History of Science, The International Philosophical Quarterly, and George Eliot in Context.