Most eighteenth-century literary scholarship associates the major developments in English literature and culture during the rise of modernity with a triumphant and increasingly tolerant Protestantism while assuming that the English Catholic community was culturally moribund and disengaged from Protestant society and culture. However, recent work by historians has shown that the English Catholic community was a dynamic and adaptive religious minority, its leaders among the aristocracy cosmopolitan, its intellectuals increasingly attracted to Enlightenment ideals of liberty and skepticism, and its membership growing among the middle and working classes.
Table des matières
Introduction
"Allways in a veile": Catholic difference in Dryden's Don Sebastian
"To act a lover's or a Roman's part": Catholic division in Pope's Eloisa to Abelard and Elegy to the memory of an unfortunate lady
"The French behaviour under the Mahometan dress": Defoe's Roxana and England's Catholic captivity
"Left to perdition": Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison and the papist unrepresented
"Let not religion be named between us": Catholic and female oppression in Inchbald's A simple story
Afterword
A propos de l'auteur
Geremy Carnes is Assistant Professor of English at Lindenwood University.
Résumé
Examines the intersections of literary, religious, and cultural history as they pertain to the slow acceptance by both Protestants and Catholics of the latter group's permanent minority status. The Papist Represented challenges the assumption that eighteenth-century literature was a fundamentally Protestant enterprise.
