Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Notes on Editions Used -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- The Victorian 'Crisis of Faith' and the Secularisation Debate -- Secularisation, Secularism, and Literary Criticism -- Aestheticism and the Imanent Frame -- Disenchantment/Re-enchantment and the Gods of Greece -- Secularism, Sexuality, and Disinterestedness -- 'This World': Victorian Secularism and Christianity -- Aestheticism and Victorian Doubt -- Notes to the Introduction -- 1 Parleying with Robert Browning and Matthew Arnold: Swinburne and the Drama of Blasphemy -- 'Hymn to Proserpine' and 'Cleon' -- 'The Leper' and 'Porphyria's Lover' -- Notes to Chapter 1 -- 2 'Though Hearts Reach Back and Memories Ache': Melancholy, Religious Doubt, and Swinburne's Strenuous Joy -- The Carpe Diem Religion: Swinburne's Minor Decadent Poems and Tennyson's In Memoriam -- 'The Darkness of These Beaches': Tennyson's In Memoriam, Swinburne's 'By the North Sea', and the Atheistic Sublime -- 'A Note of Rapture in the Tune of Life': Arnold's Tristram and Iseult, Tennyson's 'The Last Tournament', and Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse -- Notes to Chapter 2 -- 3 'A Secular, a Rebellious Spirit Often Betrays Itself ': Pater's Early Aestheticism -- 'Without the Noise of Axe or Hammer': Pater's 'Diaphaneitè', Carlyle's The French Revolution, and Secular Aesthetics -- 'Neither for God nor for his Enemies': Heresy and Disinterestedness in the Critical Essays of Arnold and Pater -- Arnold, Colenso, and the Pious Fraud Tradition -- 'Room for a Noble Antinomianism': Arnold, Heresy, and Pater's The Renaissance -- 'Our Antagonist is Our Helper': Pater, Arnold, and the Cult of Nuance -- 'Homer Must be Made to Speak Agreeably to Moses': Pater, Arnold, and the Ideal of Reconciliation