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A revelatory reading of the British novel that considers interfaith
marriage, religious toleration, and the ethics of sociability.
Bringing together feminist theory, novel criticism, and religious
studies, Alison Conway's Sacred Engagements advances a postsecular
reading of the novel that links religious tolerance and the
eighteenth-century marriage plot. Conway explores the historical
roots of the vexed questions that interfaith marriage continues to
raise today. She argues that narrative wields the power to imagine
conjugal and religious relations that support the embodied politics
crucial to a communal, rather than state-sponsored, ethics of
toleration. Conway studies the communal and gendered aspects of
religious experience embedded in Samuel Richardson's account of
interfaith marriage and liberalism's understandings of toleration
in Sir Charles Grandison. In her readings of Frances Brooke,
Elizabeth Inchbald, and Maria Edgeworth, Conway considers how women
authors reframe the questions posed by Grandison, representing
intimacy, authorship, and women's religious subjectivity in ways
that challenge the social and political norms of Protestant British
culture. She concludes with reflections on Jane Austen's Mansfield
Park and the costs of a marriage plot that insists on religious
conformity. By examining the complex epistemologies of the
interfaith marriage plot, Sacred Engagements counters the
secularization thesis that has long dominated eighteenth-century
novel studies. In so doing, the book recognizes those subjects
otherwise ignored by liberal political theory and extrapolates how
a genuinely inclusive tolerance might be imagined in our own deeply
divided times.
A revelatory reading of the British novel that considers interfaith
marriage, religious toleration, and the ethics of sociability.
Bringing together feminist theory, novel criticism, and religious
studies, Alison Conway's Sacred Engagements advances a postsecular
reading of the novel that links religious tolerance and the
eighteenth-century marriage plot. Conway explores the historical
roots of the vexed questions that interfaith marriage continues to
raise today. She argues that narrative wields the power to imagine
conjugal and religious relations that support the embodied politics
crucial to a communal, rather than state-sponsored, ethics of
toleration. Conway studies the communal and gendered aspects of
religious experience embedded in Samuel Richardson's account of
interfaith marriage and liberalism's understandings of toleration
in Sir Charles Grandison. In her readings of Frances Brooke,
Elizabeth Inchbald, and Maria Edgeworth, Conway considers how women
authors reframe the questions posed by Grandison, representing
intimacy, authorship, and women's religious subjectivity in ways
that challenge the social and political norms of Protestant British
culture. She concludes with reflections on Jane Austen's Mansfield
Park and the costs of a marriage plot that insists on religious
conformity. By examining the complex epistemologies of the
interfaith marriage plot, Sacred Engagements counters the
secularization thesis that has long dominated eighteenth-century
novel studies. In so doing, the book recognizes those subjects
otherwise ignored by liberal political theory and extrapolates how
a genuinely inclusive tolerance might be imagined in our own deeply
divided times.
This ambitious interdisciplinary study undertakes a new definition
of the eighteenth-century novel's investment in vision and visual
culture, tracing the relationship between the development of the
novel and that of the equally contentious genre of the portrait,
particularly as represented in the novel itself. Working with the
novels of Richardson, Fielding, Haywood, Manley, Sterne,
Wollstonecraft and Inchbald, and the portraits of Reynolds,
Gainsborough, Highmore, Hudson, Hogarth, and others, Private
Interests points to the intimate connections between the literary
works and the paintings. Arguing that the novel's representation of
the portrait sustains a tension between competing definitions of
private interests, Conway shows how private interests are figured
as simultaneously decorous and illicit in the novel, with the
portrait at once an instrument of propriety and of scandal.
Examining women's roles as both authors of and characters in the
novel and the novel's encounters with the portrait, the author
provides a new definition of private interests, one which
highlights the development of women's agency as both spectacles and
spectators.
Formerly a site of study reserved for intellectual historians and
political philosophers, scholarship on religious toleration, from
the perspective of literary scholars, is fairly limited. Largely
ignored and understudied techniques employed by writers to
influence cultural understandings of tolerance are rich for
exploration. In investigating texts ranging from early modern to
Romantic, Alison Conway, David Alvarez, and their contributors shed
light on what literature can say about toleration, and how it can
produce and manage feelings of tolerance and intolerance. Beginning
with an overview of the historical debates surrounding the terms
"toleration" and "tolerance," this book moves on to discuss the
specific contributions that literature and literary modes have made
to cultural history, studying the literary techniques that
philosophers, theologians, and political theorists used to frame
the questions central to the idea and practice of religious
toleration. Tracing the rhetoric employed by a wide range of
authors, the contributors delve into topics such as conversion as
an instrument of power in Shakespeare; the relationship between
religious toleration and the rise of Enlightenment satire; and the
ways in which writing can act as a call for tolerance.
After the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, Protestants
worried that King Charles II might favour religious freedom for
Roman Catholics, and many suspected that the king was unduly
influenced by his Catholic mistresses. Nell Gwyn, actress and royal
mistress, stood apart by virtue of her Protestant loyalty. In 1681,
Gwyn, her carriage surrounded by an angry anti-Catholic mob,
famously declared 'I am the protestant whore.' Her self-branding
invites an investigation into the alignment between sex and
politics during this period, and in this study, Alison Conway
relates courtesan narrative to cultural and religious anxieties. In
new readings of canonical works by Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Henry
Fielding, and Samuel Richardson, Conway argues that authors engaged
the same questions about identity, nation, authority, literature,
and politics as those pursued by Restoration polemicists. Her study
reveals the recurring connection between sexual impropriety and
religious heterodoxy in Restoration thought, and Nell Gwyn, writ
large as the nation's Protestant Whore, is shown to be a
significant figure of sexual, political, and religious controversy.
Reflections on Sentiment not only addresses current scholarly
interest in feeling and affect but also provides an occasion to
celebrate the career of George Starr, who, in more than fifty years
of incisive scholarship and committed teaching, haselucidated the
work of Daniel Defoe and the role of sentimentalism in what was
once reductively termed an age of reason and realism. Due to the
critique Starr spearheaded, scholars today can approach with
greater assurance the complex interplay of reason and emotion,
thought and sensibility, science and feeling, rationality and
enthusiasm, judgment and wit, as well as forethought and instinct,
as these shaped the scientific, religious, political, social,
literary, and cultural revolutions of the Enlightenment. Indeed,
contributors to this anthology take inspiration from Starr's work
to shed new light on Enlightenment thought and sociocultural
formations generally, offering fresh interpretations of a period in
which Reflection and Sentiment circulated, mutually influenced each
other, and contended equally for cultural attention. In nine
separate essays they explore: the ways sentiment and sentimentalism
inflect the moral and ideological ambit of Enlightenment
discourses; the sociopolitics of religious debate; the issues
promoted by women writers, by gender and family relations; the
artistic and rhetorical uses of lived language; the impacts of
cultural developments on novelistic form; and the wide shifts in
the literary marketplace. Deploying tools advanced by new work in
animal studies, gender criticism, media analysis, genre studies,
the new formalism, and ethical inquiry, and enabled by the power of
digitization and new databases, the authors of this volume explain
how and to what ends denizens of the Enlightenment were touched and
moved.
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