Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson

Resisting Secularism

Melvyn New, Gerard Reedy, Melvyn New, Gerard Reedy

• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781644530979
  9781644530962
• eBook ISBN:
  9781644530986
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson: Resisting Secularism contains seventeen essays exploring the complex relationships between literary intentions and theological concerns of authors writing in the second half of the eighteenth century. The diversity of literary forms and subjects, from Fielding and Richardson to Burke and Wollstonecraft, is matched by a diversity of approaches and theologies. To argue that the age "resisted secularism" is by no means to argue that resistance was blindly doctrinal or rigidly uniform. The many ways secularism could be resisted is the subject of the collection.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Novelistic Redemption and the History of Grace: Practical Theology and Literary Form in Richardson’s Pamela and Fielding’s Joseph Andrews
• 2 The Oxford Methodists (1733; 1738): The Purloined Letter of John Wesley at Samuel Richardson’s Press
• 3 Henry Fielding Straddles a Moving Theme
• 4 Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and the Problem of Heaven
• 5 The Intellectual Background to Johnson’s Life of Browne: A Study of Johnsonian Construction
• 6 “But Philosophy Can Tell No More”: Johnson’s Christian Moralism and the Genre of Rasselas
• 7 Johnson’s Fallen World
• 8 Aesthetics and Theology in Samuel Johnson’s Life of Isaac Watts and Prayers and Meditations (1785)
• 9 Providence, Futurity, and Typology in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield
• 10 Divine and Human Love: Letters between John Norris and Mary Astell, Laurence Sterne and Eliza Draper
• 11 Tristram Shandy and the Devil
• 12 Methodists on the Move in The Spiritual Quixote
• 13 “A Very Agreable Way of Thinking”: Devotion and Doctrine in Boswell’s Religion
• 14 Bluestockings and Religion
• 15 “Through a Glass Darkly”: Edmund Burke, Political Theology, and Literary Allusion
• 16 The Bible in the Dock: Thomas Erskine, Thomas Paine, and the Trial of The Age of Reason
• 17 The Novel as the Art of Secular Scripture: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Feminist Gospel
• About the Contributors