Corrinne Harol, The Postsecular Restoration and the Making of Literary Conservatism, Cambridge University Press, 2023.
This book reveals a synergy between postsecularity – as a critique of emergent liberal secular ideals and practices – and the modern literary sphere, in which conservative writers feature prominently. Corrinne Harol argues boldly yet compellingly that influential literary forms and practices including fiction, mental freedom, worlding, reading, narration, and historical fiction are in fact derived from these writers' responses to secularization. Interrogating a series of concepts – faith, indulgence, figuring, reading, passivity, revolution, and nostalgia – central to secular culture, this study also engages with works by Aphra Behn, John Dryden, Margaret Cavendish and Walter Scott, as well as attending to the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and Edmund Burke. Countering eighteenth-century studies' current overreliance on the secularization narrative (as content and method, fact and norm), this book models how a postsecular approach can help us to understand this period, and secularization itself, more fully.
Corrinne Harol is Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. She is the author of Enlightened Virginity in Eighteenth-Century Literature (2006) and co-editor of Literary/Liberal Entanglements (2017). Her work explores the impact of secularization on eighteenth-century literature.
