Imagining Methodism in 18th-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief & the Borders of the Self

Abstract

Misty G. Anderson. Imagining Methodism in 18th-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief & Borders of Self. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012. 296 + xii pages. $65.Misty Anderson's study of how Methodism was represented in eighteenth century, Imagining Methodism in 18th-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief & Borders of Self, opens up her subject into broad historical narratives about gender, sexuality, relationship between Christianity and secular, and, indeed, very nature of identity itself, all without losing its grounding in dense, evidential detail drawn from a dazzling array of diverse sources. In book, close readings work dialectically with important theoretical and political concepts instead of being driven and constrained by them. While focused on answering a very specific question-not what Methodism was but how Methodism was imagined in eighteenth century-Anderson's analysis of print texts from novel to hymn, of visual representations, and of embodied performances presents new ways of thinking about just religion but also gender, sexuality, and such bedrock modern concepts as the self. This is a book with its telos in any one theoretical camp or subdivision of cultural studies, though it has its roots in many. Imagining Methodism starts with an openeyed, honest interest in figuring out what Methodism and Methodists meant to eighteenth-century British publics and individuals. In process of that investigation, Anderson contributes invaluable, field-changing insight to queer, feminist, materialist, and performance-oriented work on early modern Britain and its place in history of the modern.Of course, as introduction amply documents, Anderson's focus on Methodism is hardly random but rather places her book in midst of historical debates over social relationships between various types of Christianity and alleged secularism emergent with European Enlightenment. There is a real need for good, historical, materialist work in this area. As Anderson points out, work of Marxist cultural historians such as E. P. Thompson and Max Weber tends to subsume religion into capitalist ideology as the Protestant ethic while Marxist literary critics like Ian Watt edge it out of their readings altogether to focus on an emergent, secularly motivated middle class and its realist aesthetic. Much otherwise excellent work in literary and historical cultural studies has been limited by this implicit alignment between secularism and progressive politics. Anderson joins cultural critics who are skeptical about dominance of skepticism by taking seriously proposition that Methodism, largest new religious movement in period and at heart of modern evangelicalism, might be intrinsic to our understanding of eighteenth-century culture and its active negotiation of religion in 'a secular age,' which redefines rather than destroys modern belief (6). This is to say that Anderson embraces religion over secularism as key to understanding formation of modern identities. As she puts her argument, it is not that secular and religious capture complete horizon of possibility in project of modernity, but that their opposition achieves a cultural dominance that defines era (11).The concept of self is central to Anderson's cultural analysis, a turn back to an older term and away from well-theorized, post-structuralist preference for subjectivity. Of course, Anderson has strong methodological backup in Dror Wahrman's The Making of Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England on historical formation of modern gender identities, but her choice is primarily historical; she takes her definition of term back to John Locke's conscious, thinking thing, individual consciousness. The Lockean self links this consciousness with sensation, opening itself up to feeling as well as thought. …