The Postsecular Restoration and the Making of Literary Conservatism

Corrinne Harol reveals how secularization catalysed conservative writers to respond and thereby contribute impactfully to literary history.

Corrinne Harol (Author)

9781009273480, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 December 2022

296 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.1 cm, 0.58 kg

'The postsecular does not … need to postdate the process of secularization. The two are closely bound up with one another, as Harol attempts to show through a series of fine-grained interpretative case studies … There is also a striking ambition in the range of material treated here.' Philip Connell, Eighteenth-Century Fiction

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.

Part I. Political and Fictional Relations: 1. Faith: Impersonating Faith, or How We Came to Have Faith in Fiction
2. Indulgence: The Stuart Declarations of Indulgence and their Afterlives. Part II: Postsecular Literary Experiences: Worlds and Time: 3. Figuring: Margaret Cavendish's Critique of Imagining and Worlding
4. Reading: John Dryden's Postsecular Apostolic and the Time of Literary History. Part III: Political Agents and Novel Forms: 5. Passivity: The Passion of Oroonoko and the Ethics of Narration
6. Revolution and Nostalgia: Walter Scott and the Forms of Jacobite Nostalgia. Coda: On Literary Conservatism as a Formal Category.

Subject Areas: Conservatism & right-of-centre democratic ideologies [JPFM], Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800 [DSBD], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]