The Lure of Babylon: Seven Protestant Novelists and Britain's Roman Catholic Revival

by Schiefelbein, Michael E.

• ISBN13: 9780865547209
• ISBN10: 0865547203
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-07-01
• Publisher: Mercer Univ Pr

Summary

This book explores the effect of Catholicism on the imagination and the fiction of Protestant novelists in England during the decades surrounding Catholic Emancipation (1829) and the reestablishment of the Roman Catholic Church in England (1850). This book examines anti-Catholicism in popular and respected novelists such as Scott and Dickens, showing the secret attraction to Catholicism of staunch anti-Catholic Protestants.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction Roman Catholic Revival and the British Cultural Imagination	1	(14)
``Unguarded Gaiety'': Catholicism in Walter Scott's The Monastery and The Abbot	15	(42)
``The Lessons of True Religion'': Mary Shelley's Tribute to Catholicism in Valperga	57	(28)
Little Nell, Catholicism, and Dickens's Investigation of Death	85	(16)
``The Shelter of Authority'': Frances Trollope's Concession to Catholicism in Father Eustace	101	(28)
A Catholic Baptism for Villette's Lucy Snowe	129	(14)
``Blighted'' by a ``Upas-Shadow'': Catholicism, Gender, and Sensuality in Westward Ho!	143	(22)
Crucifixes and Madonnas: Catholicism and the Validation of Suffering in Romola	165	(16)
Conclusion	181	(4)
Works Cited	185	(8)
Index	193