Sacred Engagements

Interfaith Marriage, Religious Toleration, and the British Novel, 1750-1820
Erscheinungsjahr 2023
ISBN: 978-1-4214-4515-1
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press

Buch, Englisch, 240 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 393 g

A revelatory reading of the British novel that considers interfaith marriage, religious toleration, and the ethics of sociability.

Bringing together feminist theory, novel criticism, and religious studies, Alison Conway's Sacred Engagements advances a postsecular reading of the novel that links religious tolerance and the eighteenth-century marriage plot. Conway explores the historical roots of the vexed questions that interfaith marriage continues to raise today. She argues that narrative wields the power to imagine conjugal and religious relations that support the embodied politics crucial to a communal, rather than state-sponsored, ethics of toleration.

Conway studies the communal and gendered aspects of religious experience embedded in Samuel Richardson's account of interfaith marriage and liberalism's understandings of toleration in Sir Charles Grandison. In her readings of Frances Brooke, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Maria Edgeworth, Conway considers how women authors reframe the questions posed by Grandison, representing intimacy, authorship, and women's religious subjectivity in ways that challenge the social and political norms of Protestant British culture. She concludes with reflections on Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and the costs of a marriage plot that insists on religious conformity.

By examining the complex epistemologies of the interfaith marriage plot, Sacred Engagements counters the secularization thesis that has long dominated eighteenth-century novel studies. In so doing, the book recognizes those subjects otherwise ignored by liberal political theory and extrapolates how a genuinely inclusive tolerance might be imagined in our own deeply divided times.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Conway, Alison

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Religionsgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Novel Intimacies
Chapter 1. Religious Toleration and Interfaith Marriage, 1640-1720
Chapter 2. Sir Charles Grandison's Religious Disturbances
Chapter 3. Frances Brooke's Civil Disputes
Chapter 4. Elizabeth Inchbald among the Cisalpines
Chapter 5. Maria Edgeworth's Jewish Enlightenment
Conclusion: Mansfield Park Closes Its Gates
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Conway, Alison
Alison Conway (KELOWNA, BC) is Associate Dean of Research, Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. She is the author of Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709-1791 and The Protestant Whore: Courtesan Narrative and Religious Controversy in England, 1680-1750.