Confrontations with the Invisible World: Religion, History, and Modernity in Romantic Scotland.

Scottish Romanticism;Religion and Secularization;Walter Scott;James Hogg;Robert Pollok;Anne Bannerman;English Language and Literature;Humanities;English Language and Literature

McConnell, Karen M.Lupton, Tina Jane ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Scottish Romanticism;    Religion and Secularization;    Walter Scott;    James Hogg;    Robert Pollok;    Anne Bannerman;    English Language and Literature;    Humanities;    English Language and Literature;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/97830/mcconnka_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation examines the competing tensions of religion and rationalism in the imaginative works of Scottish Romantic writers, and the often conflicting representations of history such influences produced. This project begins with Walter Scott—whose novels epitomized for many the triumph of progress and moderation and helped to create a mythologized Scotland—and reads THE TALE OF OLD MORTALITY through the lens of the religious and nationalist outrage it inspired. The next chapter turns to James Hogg’s most well-known novel, THE PRIVATE MEMOIRS AND CONFESSIONS OF A JUSTIFIED SINNER, arguing that neither religious fanatics nor enlightened rationalists ultimately emerge with a believable claim to objective truth. The second half of this project shifts to poetic works that challenge both historical and religious authority: Robert Pollok’s THE COURSE OF TIME, an epic poem that expands on the Book of Revelation, and Anne Bannerman’s TALES OF SUPERSTITION AND CHIVALRY. Pollok’s use of apocalypse flirts with the genre’s radical associations, although he ultimately retreats from such possibilities. Bannerman is more unsettling, and—like Hogg’s CONFESSIONS—draws troubling connections between religious belief and rational understanding. This last chapter examines both approaches’ inability to translate much of human experience, particularly for those ignored by the patriarchal structures from which both Presbyterianism and the Scottish Enlightenment were inextricable.Although the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was often credited with ushering in a new age, the Romantic texts studied here reveal the persistent legacy of the preceding century’s religious fanaticism and violence. They also challenge a longstanding narrative of modern progress, most notably articulated by the secularization thesis—the thesis that societies become proportionately more secular as they develop. Even Scottish writers who arguably supported these progressive models wrote imaginative literature that raised doubts about the forward, secular propulsion of human development. What is ultimately at stake in these debates is nothing less than who gets to define modernity: these works call our attention to the way history is transcribed with a particular end in mind, and reveal how such an end can be simultaneously advanced and undermined in Romantic literature.