Religion, Reading, and Metacognition in the Victorian Literature Classroom

Abstract

The Victorian literature course, ‘Victorians Reading Religion’, relocates the religious friction of the 19th century, focusing less on scientific threats, crises of faith, and schisms within Victorian churches, and more on how the shifting religious landscape of 19th-century British culture prompted Victorian thinkers to renegotiate their approaches to reading. Using Olive Schriener’s Story of an African Farm (1883) as a prime example, attending to these overlapping iterations of religious experience offers us three correlated opportunities: firstly, it helps students loosen the identity categories they might otherwise consistently apply too tidily. Secondly, it reintroduces literature as a space in which they can evaluate morality. Finally, centring religion in literary studies prompts students to recognise the ways in which the work we do in a literature classroom is itself religious. Together, these pedagogical opportunities produce occasions for metacognition that help students articulate the value of humanistic study in the increasingly instrumentalised landscape of higher education.