This book explores how a group of Victorian literary writers - including George Eliot, Walter Pater, and Matthew Arnold - became interested in the emerging anthropology of religion, which sought to explain religion not in terms of doctrines or beliefs but as a function of race or ethnicity. Cover -- Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination -- Copyright -- Acknowledgments -- Table of Contents -- Introduction: Victorian Anthropology and Victorian Secularity -- VICTORIAN ANTHROPOLOGY AND RELIGION SUI GENERIS -- RELIGION, RACE, AND THE CULTIVATED SELF -- 1: The Rubicon of Language: Max Müller, Evangelical Anthropology, and the History of True Religion -- JAMES PRICHARD AND THE POLITICS OF MONOGENESIS -- MAX MÜLLER, LANGUAGE, AND HUMAN SPIRITUAL AGENCY -- POLYGENESIS AND THE ILLIBERAL IMAGINATION -- EVOLUTION AND THE DIVORCE OF COMPARATIVE RELIGION FROM ANTHROPOLOGY -- 2: Arnoldian Secularism: Race and Political Theology from Celtic Literature to Literature and Dogma -- THE BROAD CHURCH, AESTHETIC LIBERALISM, AND THE USES OF POLYGENESIS -- HEBRAISM, HELLENISM, AND CULTURE -- RELIGION AND THE VEXATIONS OF UNIVERSALISM -- LATE ARNOLD: REAPPRAISING HOMOGENEITY -- 3: History's Second-Hand Bookshop: Self-Cultivation and Scripturality in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda and The Spanish Gypsy -- ELIOT, RELIGION, AND THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL TURN -- RACE AND THE MEDIATION OF SCRIPTURE -- ELIOT'S ETHNOGRAPHIES OF READING -- MANY-SIDEDNESS, THE BILDUNGSROMAN, AND THE PREDICAMENT OF GENDER -- 4: A More Liberal Surrender: Aestheticism, Asceticism, and Walter Pater's Erotics of Conversion -- RENAISSANCE, SURVIVALS, AND AESTHETIC CULTURE -- MARIUS THE EPICUREAN AND CONVERSION AS SURVIVAL -- PATER'S AESTHETIC ASKESIS -- MANY-SIDEDNESS AND THE POSSIBILITIES OF DISSENT -- 5: National Supernaturalism: Andrew Lang, World Literature, and the Limits of Eclecticism -- FOLKLORE THEORY FROM RACE TO EVOLUTION -- LANG, PRIMITIVISM, AND MANY-SIDED POPULISM -- THE ROMANTICISM OF SURVIVALS AND THE NEW DIFFUSIONISM -- YEATS'S OCCULT UNIVERSALISM -- Coda: Aesthetic Secularism -- Bibliography -- Index.
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