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.
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Christianity
Modern
European
18th Century
Literary Criticism
Christian Theology
History
Literature & the Arts
English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh
Religion
Theology And Literature In The Age Of Johnson 1
Contents 6
Acknowledgments 8
Introduction 10
1 Novelistic Redemption and the History of Grace: Practical Theology and Literary Form in Richardson's Pamela and Fielding's Joseph Andrews 24
2 The Oxford Methodists (1733; 1738): The Purloined Letter of John Wesley at Samuel Richardson's Press 50
3 Henry Fielding Straddles a Moving Theme 72
4 Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and the Problem of Heaven 94
5 The Intellectual Background to Johnson's Life of Browne: A Study of Johnsonian Construction 114
6 "But Philosophy Can Tell No More": Johnson's Christian Moralism and the Genre of Rasselas 136
7 Johnson's Fallen World 154
8 Aesthetics and Theology in Samuel Johnson's Life of Isaac Watts and Prayers and Meditations (1785) 170
9 Providence, Futurity, and Typology in Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield 186
10 Divine and Human Love: Letters between John Norris and Mary Astell, Laurence Sterne and Eliza Draper 206
11 Tristram Shandy and the Devil 226
12 Methodists on the Move in The Spiritual Quixote 242
13 "A Very Agreable Way of Thinking": Devotion and Doctrine in Boswell's Religion 260
14 Bluestockings and Religion 278
15 "Through a Glass Darkly": Edmund Burke, Political Theology, and Literary Allusion 300
16 The Bible in the Dock: Thomas Erskine, Thomas Paine, and the Trial of The Age of Reason 316
17 The Novel as the Art of Secular Scripture: Mary Wollstonecraft's Feminist Gospel 334
Selected Index 356
About the Contributors 370

upload/motw_shc_2025_10/shc/Theology and Literature in the - Melvyn New.pdf

motw/Theology and Literature in the - Melvyn New.pdf

edited by Melvyn New and Gerard Reedy

Adobe Acrobat 9.0

S. J. Reedy

RLPG - UD Press

United States, United States of America

Newark, Delaware, 2012

Newark, MD, cop. 2012

producers:
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Memory of the World Librarian: Calamitous Annunciation

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Seventeen essays explore 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 theologies; to argue that the age "resisted secularism" is by no means to argue that that resistance was blindly doctrinal or rigidly uniform; the many ways secularism could be resisted is the subject of the collection

2025-10-27