In 1732, a blasphemous burlesque of the Christian Atonement was
published in England without comment from the government or the
Church of England. In "Hogarth's Harlot," Ronald Paulson explains
this absence of official censure through a detailed examination of
the parameters of blasphemy in eighteenth-century England and the
changing attitudes toward the central tenets of the Christian
Church among artists in this period. Discerning a profound
spiritual and cultural shift from atonement and personal salvation
to redemption, incarnation, and acts of charity and love, Paulson
focuses on such influential factors as English antipopery and
anti-Jacobitism, as well as the ideas of the English
Enlightenment.
Offering imaginative and deeply informed readings of a wide
range of artistic works--engravings by Hogarth; poems by Milton,
Pope, Christopher Smart, and Blake; plays by Nicholas Rowe and
George Lillo; paintings and sculptures by Benjamin West, John
Zoffany, Joseph Wright of Derby, and Louis-Francois Roubiliac; and
oratorios by George Frederic Handel--Paulson explores the
significance of the medium in which artists produced "sacred
parody" and how these works both reflected and influenced attitudes
toward the nature of Christianity in England. As England's faithful
began to worry less about everlasting felicity in heaven and more
about life on earth, these diverse artists provided them with new
ways of thinking about both their spiritual and their social
existence.
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