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Coda

On Literary Conservatism as a Formal Category

from Part III - Political Agents and Novel Forms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2023

Corrinne Harol
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
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Summary

The book has argued – via keywords and close readings – that certain forms of literary representation derive from their author’s concerns about what we now call secularization. It posits that cultural concepts (faith, worlds, nostalgia), forms of mentation (indulgence, figuring), literary forms (novelistic narration, historical fiction), and even fiction and modes of reading themselves result from the conservative orientation of their authors. In so doing, it argues for treating the secular and the postsecular as relevant not just to politics or religion but also to literary forms and innovation, theories of mind, and conceptualizations of temporality and mentation more generally. In fact, a central insight of the book is that the postsecular is motivated not necessarily by political or religious opposition – or even by a renegotiation of the relationship between the religious and the secular – but rather by changes wrought by secularization across the spheres of cultural and social life, and it argues that the literary sphere provided both the site and the methods for that process. This study has also demonstrated that secularization and liberalism are not separate from postsecularization and conservatism – rather, they are interdependent, as this study’s keywords suggest: Faith and indulgence, transformed for a secular system, make possible belief and toleration; imagining worlds and reading literary history are embedded in secular spatiality and temporality, even as they reveal the offenses and limitations wrought by these secular categories; passivity and the revolution/nostalgia dynamic both keep alive and keep in check the liberal fiction of human agency. The conservative and the postsecular are thus constantly in tension with the liberal and secular. This is why it is no coincidence that the concerns of people not well served by liberalism – not just royals but also women and enslaved people – occur repeatedly in this study. This is also why the two characteristics that most distinguish these conservative writers – their opposition to revolution and their innovative literary formations – are connected.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Coda
  • Corrinne Harol, University of Alberta
  • Book: <i>The Postsecular Restoration and the Making of Literary Conservatism</i>
  • Online publication: 22 June 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009273497.011
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  • Coda
  • Corrinne Harol, University of Alberta
  • Book: <i>The Postsecular Restoration and the Making of Literary Conservatism</i>
  • Online publication: 22 June 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009273497.011
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Coda
  • Corrinne Harol, University of Alberta
  • Book: <i>The Postsecular Restoration and the Making of Literary Conservatism</i>
  • Online publication: 22 June 2023
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009273497.011
Available formats
×