The Fringes of Belief - English Literature, Ancient Heresy, and the Politics of Freethinking, 1660-1760 (Hardcover)

"The Fringes of Belief" is the first literary study of freethinking and religious skepticism in the English Enlightenment. Ellenzweig aims to redress this scholarly lacuna, arguing that a literature of English freethinking has been overlooked because it unexpectedly supported aspects of institutional religion. Analyzing works by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope, she foregrounds a strand of the English freethinking tradition that was suspicious of revealed religion yet often strongly opposed to the open denigration of Anglican Christianity and its laws. By exposing the contradictory and volatile status of categories like belief and doubt this book participates in the larger argument in Enlightenment studies--as well as in current scholarship on the condition of modernity more generally---that religion is not so simply left behind in the shift from the pre-modern to the modern world.

General

Imprint:	Stanford University Press
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	September 2008
First published:	2008
Authors:	Sarah Ellenzweig
Dimensions:	229 x 152 x 458mm (L x W x H)
Format:	Hardcover - Cloth / Cloth
Pages:	256
ISBN-13:	978-0-8047-5877-2
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 16th to 18th centuries
LSN:	0-8047-5877-8
Barcode:	9780804758772

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