The Victorian period was a historical moment marked by secularization. While religious belief remained widespread and interest in religion continued to rise, it was becoming clear that the place of faith had dramatically changed. British society was undergoing what sociologists call social differentiation, the aspect of modernity in which various institutions grow increasingly autonomous and dedicated to distinctive, unique purposes. This process, which many sociologists consider the core of secularization, transforms religion's social place; it diminishes religion's authority in other social spheres and redirects its attention toward individual belief. Meanwhile, differentiation has similarly radical effects on other social institutions, including literature. Writers are granted the increasing freedom provided by relatively autonomous aesthetics, freeing them to explore the rules and possibilities of their field, but their ability to explore problems from other social spheres threatens to diminish. Victorian writers face a dilemma: how can they investigate the ways in which religion has been transformed, and religion's place in a secularizing world, without abandoning the newly coherent field of literature?;This dissertation argues that Victorian writers, across a range of genres and religious positions, solve this problem through an intensified interest in literary form. Form emerges as the main site where writers work through aesthetic problems; it also lets poets and novelists embody their attitudes towards religion. What emerges across a variety of writers, from religious believers (Anthony Trollope, Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti) to skeptics (George Eliot, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Augusta Webster) is a commitment to what might be called partial differentiation: a position that accepts a qualified version of secularization and modernization. While writers embrace the artistic freedom that differentiation promises, they continue to believe that literature, through its formal techniques, can embrace its aesthetic role even as it addresses the problems religion faces under secularization, and its future within modernity.
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