Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century: A Literary History of Atheism (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781108835909)

Although there were no self-avowed British atheists before the 1780s, authors including Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Sarah Fielding, Phebe Gibbes, and William Cowper worried extensively about atheism's dystopian possibilities, and routinely represented atheists as being beyond the pale of human sympathy. Challenging traditional formulations of secularization that equate modernity with unbelief, Reeves reveals how reactions against atheism rather helped sustain various forms of religious belief throughout the Age of Enlightenment. He demonstrates that hostility to unbelief likewise produced various forms of religious ecumenicalism, with authors depicting non-Christian theists from around Britain's emerging empire as sympathetic allies in the fight against irreligion. Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century traces a literary history of atheism in eighteenth-century Britain for the first time, revealing a relationship between atheism and secularization far more fraught than has previously been supposed.

Author: James Bryant Reeves
ISBN-10: 1108835902
ISBN-13: 9781108835909
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 07/09/2020
Pages: 260
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.25lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.69d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 11/01/2021