The Postsecular Restoration and the Making of Literary Conservatism - Hardcover

Harol, Corrinne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1009273485 ISBN 13: 9781009273480

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2022

Synopsis

This book reveals a synergy between postsecularity – as a critique of emergent liberal secular ideals and practices – and the modern literary sphere, in which conservative writers feature prominently. Corrinne Harol argues boldly yet compellingly that influential literary forms and practices including fiction, mental freedom, worlding, reading, narration, and historical fiction are in fact derived from these writers' responses to secularization. Interrogating a series of concepts – faith, indulgence, figuring, reading, passivity, revolution, and nostalgia – central to secular culture, this study also engages with works by Aphra Behn, John Dryden, Margaret Cavendish and Walter Scott, as well as attending to the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and Edmund Burke. Countering eighteenth-century studies' current overreliance on the secularization narrative (as content and method, fact and norm), this book models how a postsecular approach can help us to understand this period, and secularization itself, more fully.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1009273485
• ISBN 13: 9781009273480
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 296