Rachel Ablow
Belief as Culture: Flora Annie Steel’s Imperialist Postsecularism
This paper considers the complex imperial politics involved in regarding belief as bound up with culture—and so, too, the potential complicity of both universalizing and anti-universalizing gestures with justifications of empire. It is taken from a larger project entitled, “Compelling Feelings: Belief and Affect in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel,“ which examines nineteenth-century writers’ interest in the social, political, and psychic consequences of understanding belief as grounded in affective experience, and hence, too, in culture and history.
Rachel Ablow works on the literary histories of affect, subjectivity, and the novel. She is the author of two monographs--The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Victorian Marriage Plot (Stanford, 2007), and Victorian Pain (Princeton, 2017)—and the editor of the most recent edition of The Norton Anthology: The Victorian Age (2024). Her essays have appeared in Representations, Critical Inquiry (forthcoming), Novel, MLQ, ELH, and Victorian Studies. She recently ended her tenure as editor of Victorian Literature and Culture (2018-24). She serves as Vice-President of the North American Victorian Studies Association.