| Description |
1 online resource (viii, 288 pages) |
| Contents |
An age of atheism -- A complete system of atheism: Jonathan Swift -- Godless dunces: Alexander Pope -- The limits of self: Sarah Fielding -- Gender and the Orient: Phebe Gibbes -- Ecumenical poetics: William Cowper -- Sympathy and unbelief: Percy Shelley |
| 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"-- Provided by publisher |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index |
| Notes |
Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on August 12, 2020) |
| Subject |
English fiction -- 18th century -- History and criticism
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Atheism in literature.
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Atheism in literature
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English fiction
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| Genre/Form |
Criticism, interpretation, etc.
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| Form |
Electronic book
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| LC no. |
2020004269 |
| ISBN |
9781108869461 |
|
1108869467 |
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1108875157 |
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9781108875158 |
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