The Postsecular Restoration and the Making of Literary Conservatism

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.