The idea of tradition seems a timeless one, but our modern understanding of the term was actually shaped by the Victorian revival of tradition as a cornerstone of religion, art and culture. Stephen Prickett traces how the word 'tradition' fell out of use in English by the middle of the eighteenth century and how it returned in the nineteenth having radically changed and gained in meaning. Prickett analyses the work of authors who, like Burke, perhaps unexpectedly, avoid use of the concept, as well as those who, like Coleridge, Keble and Newman, who, variously influenced by German Romantics, explored it in detail, and disagreed profoundly with each other as to its implications. An important contribution to literature, history and theology, this sweeping work shows how people manufacture their own idea of truth, customs, or ancient wisdom to make sense of the past in terms of a problematic present.
• An important new study by a senior scholar of literature and the history of ideas • Original new take on the role tradition has played in culture over the last three centuries • Of interest to literary scholars, historians, theologians and philosophers
Contents
Introduction: ancient & modern: the Braid of Cassiodorus; 1. Tradition, literacy and change; 2. Church versus Scripture: idea of Biblical tradition; 3. Tradition and revolution; 4. Envisioning the past: metaphors and symbols of tradition; 5. Re-inventing Christian culture: Volney, Chateaubriand and the French Revolution; 6. Herder, Schleiermacher, Novalis, and Schlegel: the idea of a Christian Europe?; 7. Translating Herder: the idea of Protestant Romanticism; 8. Keble and the Anglican tradition; 9. Newman and the development of tradition; 10. Arnold: taking religion out of religion; 11. Radical tradition: theologizing Eliot; Epilogue: re-energizing the past; Appendix: Velázquez and the Royal Boar Hunt; Bibliography; Index.
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