Religion and literature

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521781442.019

17 - Religion and literature

from PART III - LITERATURE AND INTELLECTUAL LIFE: THE PRODUCTION AND TRANSMISSION OF CULTURE

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

Isabel Rivers

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John Richetti

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John Richetti: Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania

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Summary

The religious spectrum

It is now more widely recognised than it was a hundred years ago that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English society and culture was essentially religious in its institutions, practices and beliefs, and that writing on religious subjects dominated the publishing market. Yet as literary readers in the early twenty-first century, we still confine our attention to a handful of explicitly religious works of the period, and we tend to downplay the religious aims and aspects of other works that we regard as predominantly literary or political or philosophical. Behind the major religious works that are still reedited and reissued today – notably Milton's Paradise Lost and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress – stretches a vast hinterland of works that went through multiple editions in the eighteenth century and often into the nineteenth, but that are now largely neglected except by specialists. This chapter provides a map for exploring this hinterland. But in order to understand the significance of particular works it is necessary first to consider three broad topics: the range of religious denominations and groups and the main political events that affected their relations with each other; the principal theological and philosophical issues that religious writers of different persuasions addressed; and the preferred kinds of religious writing and their functions.

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Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 , pp. 445 - 470

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521781442.019 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2005

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