Unquiet Things : Secularism in the Romantic Age / Colin Jager.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Jager, Colin, Author.

Series:

Haney Foundation series.

Haney Foundation Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Romanticism--Great Britain.

Romanticism.

Secularization (Theology)--History--19th century.

Secularization (Theology).

Secularization (Theology)--History--18th century.

Theology in literature--History--19th century.

Theology in literature.

Theology in literature--History--18th century.

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

English literature--18th century--History and criticism.

Religion and literature--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Religion and literature.

Religion and literature--Great Britain--History--18th century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2014]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

In Great Britain during the Romantic period, governmental and social structures were becoming more secular as religion was privatized and depoliticized. If the discretionary nature of religious practice permitted spiritual freedom and social differentiation, however, secular arrangements produced new anxieties. Unquiet Things investigates the social and political disorders that arise within modern secular cultures and their expression in works by Jane Austen, Horace Walpole, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley among others. Emphasizing secularism rather than religion as its primary analytic category, Unquiet Things demonstrates that literary writing possesses a distinctive ability to register the discontent that characterizes the mood of secular modernity. Colin Jager places Romantic-era writers within the context of a longer series of transformations begun in the Reformation, and identifies three ways in which romanticism and secularism interact: the melancholic mood brought on by movements of reform, the minoritizing capacity of literature to measure the disturbances produced by new arrangements of state power, and a prospective romantic thinking Jager calls "after the secular." The poems, novels, and letters of the romantic period reveal uneasy traces of the spiritual past, haunted by elements that trouble secular politics; at the same time, they imagine new and more equitable possibilities for the future. In the twenty-first century, Jager contends, we are still living within the terms of the romantic response to secularism, when literature and philosophy first took account of the consequences of modernity.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Introduction. Unquiet Things

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Power of the Prince: Henry VIII and Henry VIII

Chapter 2. The Melancholy of the Secular

Chapter 3. Wishing for Nothing: Emma and the Dissolution

Chapter 4. Coleridge at Sea: ‘‘Kubla Khan’’ and the Invention of Religion

Chapter 5. Hippogriffs in the Library: Realism and Opposition from Hume to Scott

Chapter 6. The Creation of Religious Minorities: Hogg’s Justified Sinner

Chapter 7. Byron and the Paradox of Reading

Chapter 8. The Constellations of Romantic Religion

Chapter 9. Shelley After Atheism

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jun 2020)

ISBN:

9780812290400

0812290402

OCLC:

896843797