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Lori Branch

18th Century Britain

In August 2000, I defended my dissertation on spontaneity in eighteenth-century British culture the same week I started teaching at the University of Iowa.   For me, the surprising discovery of that thesis-length argument was that, from Dissent to moral philosophy to sentimental novels and Romanticism, the rising cultural value of spontaneity across the long eighteenth-century was about secularization : about the pressures to articulate what had been religious values in a newly scientific and increasingly capitalistic modernity.   So a large part of the transformation of that thesis into a book—Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth (2006 read Introduction) —has been forging an interdisciplinary theoretical apparatus for thinking about secularism and finding a language in which to speak critically about religion in a field that, as Shaun Irlam has put it, generally erases the religious by passing over it in silence.   In the process of writing this manuscript, the keystone of my thinking has become the critical examination of the secular/religious binary that emerges in Enlightenment.   I have come to realize that a genuine critique of this binary will seriously challenge both conventional modern notions of religion and incipient secular/ ist assumptions in criticism.   In this way my work on religion is pointedly not conservative or traditional, and indeed, often finds its most angry rebuttals, despite competition from some materialists and neo-Marxists, coming from religious voices.  

Getting at the heart of the ire that religion raised among eighteenth-century lumières (of both secular and religious varieties) and that it continues to raise is the focus of my second book project, titled The Violation of God: Sex, Secularism and Enlightenment .   This project begins with an opening “archaeological” chapter on religious images in eighteenth-century pornography and erotica, which I began researching in my first visit to the Kinsey Institute Archives at Indiana University in May 2005.   These images reveal the libidinal enjoyment involved in positioning the rational, masculine, secular subject as the master and exploiter of feminized religious figures, from Clarissa to Christ.   Subsequent chapters focus on masculinized secular identities in works of Richardson, Sterne, Hume and Sade, while the final chapter pairs Edward Young and Laurence Sterne as writers that explore the sexual and gender identities open to male religious subjects in the eighteenth century.