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.

Focused on conservative writers of the long Restoration, this book reveals a synergistic relationship between postsecularity and the modern sphere of literature. Its provocative account of the relationship between literature and politics is stimulating for scholars of eighteenth-century culture, literary studies, religion, and postsecularity.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.