Documents eighteenth-century literary representations of atheism, arguing that opposition to atheism generated unique forms of religious belief.

The Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literatures in English brings together essays that respond to consequential cultural and socio-economic changes that followed the expansion of the British Empire from the British Isles across the Atlantic. Scholars track the cumulative power of the slave trade, settlements and plantations, and the continual warfare that reshaped lives in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Importantly, they also analyze the ways these histories reshaped class and social relations, scientific inquiry and invention, philosophies of personhood, and cultural and intellectual production. As European nations fought each other for territories and trade routes, dispossessing and enslaving Indigenous and Black people, the observations of travellers, naturalists, and colonists helped consolidate racism and racial differentiation, as well as the philosophical justifications of “civilizational” differences that became the hallmarks of intellectual life. Essays in this volume address key shifts in disciplinary practices even as they examine the past, looking forward to and modeling a rethinking of our scholarly and pedagogic practices. This volume is an essential text for academics, researchers, and students researching eighteenth-century literature, history, and culture.

Is Laurence Sterne one of the great Christian apologists? Ryan Stark recommends him as such, perhaps to the detriment of the parson's roguish reputation. The book's aim, however, is not to dispel roguishness but rather to discern the theological motives behind Sterne's comic rhetoric, from Tristram Shandy and the sermons to A Sentimental Journey. To this end, Stark reveals a veritable avalanche of biblical themes and allusions to be found in Sterne, often and seemingly awkwardly in the middle of sex jokes, and yet the effect is not to produce irreverence. On the contrary, we find an irreverently reverent apologetic, Stark argues, and a priest who knows how to play gracefully with religious ideas. Through Sterne, in fact, we might rethink humour's role in the service of religion.

"Virginia H. Cope analyzes the transition to modern ideals of identity by tracking a character type, here called the Heroine of Disinterest, that dominated late eighteenth-century British fiction. Best represented in Frances Burney's 1778 Evelina, the Heroine of Disinterest is a young woman of uncertain birth but unshakeable virtue, manifested in her acts of charity and absolute imperviousness to the lure of wealth and status. Although the selfless heroine and the inheritance plot in which she figures are often dismissed as conventional, this book demonstrates that the character was central to mediating the vexed relations among property, education, and identity, unsettled by the rise of a capitalist ethos. Associating disinterest with women rescued the ancient ideal from extinction while also providing the discursive means to divide subjectivity from proprietorship, opening the way for the Romantic ideal of selfhood as the product of experience and reflection rather than inherited wealth and lineage." --book cover.