Summer Seminar for faculty, titled "Postsecular Studies and the Rise of the English Novel, 1719-1897." The germ of our seminar was simple. We are scholars who work on eighteenth-and nineteenth-century British literature, and we edit monograph series in religion, literature, and postsecular studies. In our experience, scholars in our fields have yet to take up the insights of postsecular scholarship in meaningful ways. By and large, their stories still cast the novel as the handmaid of secularization, reworking the well-worn plot of religion's decline rather than of its complex transformation and shape-shifting nature in modernity. We wanted to lead a seminar that gave faculty a chance to read postsecular scholarship from many disciplines alongside canonical and lesser-well-known novels from Robinson Crusoe to Dracula, tuning our ears to hear other possibilities about the migrations of religion and secularism in these narratives. The term "postsecular" continues to be used in a variety of ways that are important to distinguish. In Post-Secular Philosophy (1998) Philip Blond used it to describe a "Radical Orthodox" theological orientation. For Jürgen Habermas the postsecular is a political designation for a European society no longer homogenously secular and grappling to integrate religious citizens in the public sphere. For scholars in our discipline, it is often a literary-historical term borrowed from John McClure's Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (2007), identifying select post-WWII literature more occupied with faith and spirituality than the modernist fiction that preceded it. In framing our seminar, we used the term "postsecular" primarily in a fourth sense, as shorthand for

A full third of Grace Abounding recounts one traumatic experience: a voice coaxing Bunyan for over a year to "Sell him," to sell Christ, "for this or that." Criticism has ignored the economic form of this episode. I argue that in it we see the symptom of an early modern religious subjectivity coming to understand itself in evidentiary, economic terms; "Sell him" marks the incommensurability between economic logic and personal relation. Where criticism has long recognized the relationship between Grace Abounding and Pilgrim's Progress as "creative reworking," I argue that Pilgrim's Progress relieves the particular wounds described in Grace Abounding.

No abstract

No abstract

This chapter makes the case for integrating theory and theology in our reading of Bunyan as fruitful for a deeper understanding of his works and as exemplary of the potential of emerging post-secular criticism. By taking up the thematic of faith in Grace Abounding (1666), The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), and select works by Jacques Derrida, it shows how these texts illuminate faith as faith—not faith reconstituted as knowledge—as an inherent part of the linguistic condition. It claims that the particular mode of Bunyan’s literary recasting of the epistemological uncertainty faced in Grace Abounding into the fantasy form of The Pilgrim’s Progress suggests the contours of a larger understanding of the significance of fantasy fiction for Anglophone Protestant Christianity in modernity: that is, that fantasy fiction is where a spirituality that has imagined faith as knowledge embodies the fuller truth of its status as faith.