[Rel-and-spir-caucus] a Victorian Studies cluster proposal

[Michelle Taylor]

Dear Savannah and the Religion & Spiritualities Caucus,

I just read your message re: putting together a cluster/forum proposal for Victorian Studies.

It so happens that a series of medical events over the holidays forced a show to go on without me, and I now have an article that is homeless. It is not written in full, but the parts that are not drafted are thoroughly outlined, so it’s just a matter of having a reason to pick it back up and finish it off. I would love for it to land in such an appropriate venue—and before I’ve lost my momentum, too.

You can find my original abstract for it below. If the caucus thinks it may work as part of a developing cluster, please let me know.

All best,
Michelle Taylor
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“Daniel Deronda, John Wesley, and Trans-Religious Identity”

While Eliot may ultimately present Daniel Deronda as the ideal Jew, his Jewish identity is only landed upon after other religious identities have been tried out upon him. These include the Anglicanism he was adopted into and the Buddhism Amy Meyrick associates with him. There is another association that is less obvious, however: the association between Deronda and John Wesley/Methodism.

The epigraph for Chapter 20 is a sentence from an appendix to the second edition of Southey’s Life of Wesley. This quotation from Alexander Knox defends Wesley’s “predilection for the female character” and its manifestations in too-familiar correspondence by claiming it a result of his “finding in females a quicker and fuller responsiveness to his own ideas of interior piety and affectionate devotion.” Wesley’s own writing becomes feminized via Knox’s descriptions, mirroring the way that Daniel is feminized by his associations with women before he finds his place with Mordecai/the Zionist movement. My paper will explore why Eliot chooses to make Daniel a trans-religious character, both in the sense of why he must “pass through” Methodism and other religions before landing on Zionism, and what it means that religious identity is presented as “trans-” in the first place.

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Michelle M. Taylor, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Instruction
Director of The Wesley Works Digitization Project<https://wesleyworks.ecdsdev.org/index.html>
Department of English
The University of South Florida

Pronouns: she/her/hers
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