| This dissertation examines the play of representations of religious and secularist discourses in a series of novels written from 1870 to the present moment, in Victorian England, colonial Ireland and India, and postcolonial India. I argue that the novels in question critique "religion," in the form of religious institutions, but that the rhetoric of this critique and the concept of the modern subject that emerge out of the critique produce a proliferation of religious discourses, rather than repression of religion. Beginning with a reading of religion and secularism in England, I show how representations of religious minorities, primarily Jews and Catholics, in texts such as George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Benjamin Disraeli's Tancred, John Henry Newman's Loss and Gain, and Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, challenge the idea that Englishness is equivalent to secularity. The scope of the project also goes beyond England; colonial ideas about the link between religious identity and nationhood strongly influence the emergence of nationalist movements in Ireland and India, and this influence enters into colonial novels such as James Joyce's Ulysses and Rabindranath Tagore's Gora. Finally, the English and the colonial strands of this argument are united---and transformed---in the postcolonial era, in Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses. As a corrective to conventional paradigms of secularization, I propose a concept of the "postsecular," linking Jewish cultural studies, Derridean deconstruction, and postcolonial theory to ascertain the positive roles played by religious discourse in the modern world. |
