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Full Description
Secular Chains offers an original and richly contextualized account of the relationship between poetry and religious controversy between 1649 and 1745. This was a period of political conflict and intellectual upheaval, in which traditional sources of spiritual authority were variously challenged and transformed. This study reveals the importance of English literary culture for our understanding of this process, and throws new light on the dynamics of change and continuity between the puritan revolution and the early Enlightenment.
Based on extensive research in both printed and manuscript sources, the book combines detailed case studies of major literary figures with a sustained historical narrative linking the republican moment of the 1650s, the conflicts and crises of the Restoration, and the ecclesiastical politics of the early eighteenth century. Milton and Dryden provide the principal focus of the first three chapters, which explore the divisive issue of church settlement in the work of both writers, together with the increasingly prominent rhetoric of anti-clericalism and irreligion in the poetry and polemics of the later seventeenth century. Subsequent chapters extend the book's argument to the embattled condition of the Church of England in the decades after 1688, and the significant contribution of contemporary literary culture to a range of religious and philosophical argument, from heterodox free-thinking to Newtonian natural theology. Secular Chains demonstrates the close and continued relationship between poetry and religious politics in the age of Milton and Pope, and provides a new framework for understanding this complex and turbulent period in English literary history.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
Note on the Text
Introduction
PART I: COMMONWEALTH
1: 'Hireling wolves': Poetry, Prophecy and Republican Religion
PART II: RESTORATION
2: The Failure of Uniformity
3: 'Priests of all Religions are the same': Dryden and the Politics of Irreligion
PART III: ENLIGHTENMENT
4: Whig Poetics and the Church in Danger
5: The Literature of Physico-Theology
6: Alexander Pope and the Modes of Faith
Coda: Pope, Milton, Modernity
Bibliography
Index
