Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson

Resisting Secularism

Edited by Melvyn New and Gerard Reedy

University of Delaware Press

Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson: Resisting Secularism contains seventeen essays exploring the complex relationships between literary intentions and theological concerns of authors writing in the second half of the eighteenth century. The diversity of literary forms and subjects, from Fielding and Richardson to Burke and Wollstonecraft, is matched by a diversity of approaches and theologies. To argue that the age “resisted secularism” is by no means to argue that resistance was blindly doctrinal or rigidly uniform. The many ways secularism could be resisted is the subject of the collection.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

[…] the collection restores a historical sense of just how great the influence of theological discourse was on writers of every stamp during the late 18th century. Choice

Melvyn New is Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida.
Gerard Reedy, S.J., was former Professor of English at Fordham University and former President of the College of the Holy Cross.

Acknowledgments
Introduction by Melvyn New

1. Novelistic Redemption and the History of Grace: Pratical Theology and Literary Form in Richardson's Pamela and Fielding's Joseph Andrews by Donald R. Wehrs
2. The Oxford Methodists (1733; 1738): The Purloined Letter of John Wesley at Samuel Richardson's Press by John A. Dussinger
3. Henry Fielding Straddles a Moving Theme by Regina Janes
4. Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and the Problem of Heaven by E. Derek Taylor
5. The Intellectual Background to Johnson's Life of Browne: A Study of Johnsonian Construction by Robert G. Walker
6. "But Philosphy Can Tell No More": Johnson's Christian Moralism and the Genre of Rasselas by Patrick Muller
7. Johnson's Fallen World by Steven Scherwatzky
8. Aesthetics and Theology in Samuel Johnson's Life of Isaac Watts and Prayers and Meditations (1785) by Katharine Kickel
9. Providence, Futurity, and Typology in Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield by Nicholas Seager
10. Divine and Human Love: Letters between John Norris and Mary Astell, Laurence Sterne and Eliza Draper by Geoff Newton
11. Tristram Shandy and the Devil by Ryan J. Stark
12. Methodists on the Move in the The Spiritual Quixote by Brett C. McInelly
13. "A Very Agreable Way of Thinking": Devotion and Doctrine in Boswell's Religion by Paul Tankard
14. Bluestockings and Religion by Deborah Heller
15. "Through a Glass Darkly": Edmund Burke, Political Theology, and Literary Allusion by Frans De Bruyn
16. The Bible in the Dock: Thomas Erskine, Thomas Paine, and the Trial of The Age of Reason by Roger D. Lund
17. The Novel as the Art of Secular Scripture: Mary Wollstonecraft's Feminist Gospel by Nathalie Zimpfer

About the Contributors

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