Modernity and the Reinvention of Tradition
Backing into the Future

An original investigation into how tradition has developed over the centuries into our modern understanding of the term.

Stephen Prickett (Author)

9781107412590, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 3 January 2013

274 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.37 kg

The idea of tradition seems a timeless one, but our modern understanding of the term was actually shaped by the Victorian revival of tradition as a cornerstone of religion, art and culture. Stephen Prickett traces how the word 'tradition' fell out of use in English by the middle of the eighteenth century and how it returned in the nineteenth having radically changed and gained in meaning. Prickett analyses the work of authors who, like Burke, perhaps unexpectedly, avoid use of the concept, as well as those who, like Coleridge, Keble and Newman, who, variously influenced by German Romantics, explored it in detail, and disagreed profoundly with each other as to its implications. An important contribution to literature, history and theology, this sweeping work shows how people manufacture their own idea of truth, customs, or ancient wisdom to make sense of the past in terms of a problematic present.

Introduction: ancient & modern: the Braid of Cassiodorus
1. Tradition, literacy and change
2. Church versus Scripture: idea of Biblical tradition
3. Tradition and revolution
4. Envisioning the past: metaphors and symbols of tradition
5. Re-inventing Christian culture: Volney, Chateaubriand and the French Revolution
6. Herder, Schleiermacher, Novalis, and Schlegel: the idea of a Christian Europe?
7. Translating Herder: the idea of Protestant Romanticism
8. Keble and the Anglican tradition
9. Newman and the development of tradition
10. Arnold: taking religion out of religion
11. Radical tradition: theologizing Eliot
Epilogue: re-energizing the past
Appendix: Velázquez and the Royal Boar Hunt
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: History [HB], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literature & literary studies [D]