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Deism in Enlightenment England: Theology, Politics, and Newtonian Public Science

Online ISBN:
9781781703304
Print ISBN:
9780719078729
Publisher:
Manchester University Press
Book

Deism in Enlightenment England: Theology, Politics, and Newtonian Public Science

Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth
Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth
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Published online:
19 July 2012
Published in print:
1 March 2009
Online ISBN:
9781781703304
Print ISBN:
9780719078729
Publisher:
Manchester University Press

Abstract

This book explores at length the French and English Catholic literary revivals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These parallel but mostly independent movements include writers such as Charles Péguy, Paul Claudel, J. K. Huysmans, Gerard Manley Hopkins, G. K. Chesterton and Lionel Johnson. Rejecting critical approaches that tend to treat Catholic writings as exotic marginalia, the book makes extensive use of secularisation theory to confront these Catholic writings with the preoccupations of secularism and modernity. It compares individual and societal secularisation in France and England and examines how French and English Catholic writers understood and contested secular mores, ideologies and praxis, in the individual, societal and religious domains. The book also addresses the extent to which some Catholic writers succumbed to the seduction of secular instincts, even paradoxically in themes that are considered to be emblematic of Catholic literature. Its breadth will make it a useful guide for students wishing to become familiar with a wide range of such writings in France and England during this period.

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