Secularism has garnered little sustained attention from students of romanticism. In large part, this is because scholars of the period have treated religion as something that influenced romanticism or as something that romanticism secularized or humanized. In treating religion as a self-evident cat- egory, such accounts naturalize the opposition of the secular and the religious and thereby obscure secularism as an object of study. However, the idea that the opposition between the secular and the religious is self-evident has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, and romanticism can serve as a site for that scrutiny once it is uncoupled from secularization narratives. Though such lan- guage is rather unfashionable now, romanticism has long been interpreted as offering a concept of literary representation capacious enough to negotiate among competing philosophical, metaphysical, and spiritual claims. Tied to a seculariza- tion narrative, romanticism thus becomes an alternative to religion. Disentangled from the plot of secularization, however, that very same conceptualization of lit- erary representation can appear as an alternative not to religion but to the increas- ingly stressed secular spaces that have sought to displace religion. Romanticism’s potential contribution toward an analysis of secularism resides in the outsized claims that it makes for literary representation (or, more generally, aesthetic rep- resentation). This essay asks how such claims may help to analyze and amend secularism’s similarly outsized claims to have solved the seemingly irresolvable conflicts of religion.

Answering such questions will require attention to competing tendencies within romanticism itself. On the one hand, romanticism appears to comport well with the sequestering of religious discourse that characterizes secularism. Because romanticism’s self-consciousness is often construed as positing for literature an autotelic or autonomous domain, religion under the influence of romanticism seems to become a private and unique phenomenon. On the other hand, construing romanticism along the lines of literary autonomy highlights the diversity of experiences imagined through aesthetic representation, thereby producing alternatives to the sui generis interpretation of religion that figures so prominently in secular accounts. Thus the wealth of potential conversations that romanticism envisions through its elevation of the literary offers a model for how to think beyond what one critic has called “the conceits of secularismâ€?1—conceits increasingly recognized as theoretically and politically disabling.