Godless fictions in the eighteenth century : a literary history of atheism /
"Godless Fictions traces a literary history of atheism in eighteenth-century Britain, illustrating the paradoxical ways in which atheism's presence in the period's literature was meant to prevent its presence in the real world. To demonstrate atheism's centrality in the period, I...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY :
Cambridge University Press,
2020.
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| Summary: | "Godless Fictions traces a literary history of atheism in eighteenth-century Britain, illustrating the paradoxical ways in which atheism's presence in the period's literature was meant to prevent its presence in the real world. To demonstrate atheism's centrality in the period, I focus on imaginative worlds in which God is entirely absent and on characters that, in Archbishop Tillotson's terms, "do not believe the foundations and principles of religion," chiefly "the existence of GOD." The key authors I address-Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Sarah Fielding, Phebe Gibbes, and William Cowper-discovered in atheism a generative literary concept that helped produce some of their most well-known works. For instance, Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), Fielding's The Adventures of David Simple (1744), and Cowper's The Task (1785) all imagine worlds overwhelmed by godlessness. Like the heroine of Gibbes's Lady Louisa Stroud (1764), Caroline Stretton, who is simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by that novel's villainous male atheist, these works are fascinated by, and sometimes flirt dangerously with, unbelief. In other words, even as atheism is presented as something to be avoided at all costs, these godless fictions continually return to it, betraying an anxiety that is otherwise denied in their most straightforward disavowals of irreligion"-- |
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| Physical Description: | viii, 288 pages ; 24 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781108835909 1108835902 |