Catholic literature and secularisation in France and England, 1880-1914 / Brian Sudlow.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Individual and societal secularisation in France and England -- Recovering the porous individual -- Thinking and believing -- The fragments of secular society -- Mending secular fragmentation -- Ultimate societal values -- Catholic religiosity and the hierarchical Church -- Catholic religiosity and the charismatic Church -- Concluding reflections.

This book is the first comparative study of its kind to explore at length the French and English Catholic literary revivals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These parallel but mostly independent movements include writers such as Charles Peguy, Paul Claudel, J.K. Huysmans, Gerard Manley Hopkins, G.K. Chesterton, and Lionel Johnson. Rejecting critical approaches which tend to treat Catholic writings as exotic marginalia, this book makes extensive use of secularisation theory to confront these Catholic writings with the preoccupations of secularism and modernity. The book compares individual and societal secularisation in France and England and examines how French and English Catholic writers understood and contested secular mores, ideologies and praxis, in the individual, societal and religious domains. It also addresses the extent to which some Catholic writers succumbed to the seduction of secular instincts, even paradoxically in themes which are considered to be emblematic of Catholic literature. The breadth of this book will make it a useful guide for students wishing to become familiar with a wide range of such writings in France and England during this period. It will also appeal to researchers interested in Catholic literary and intellectual history in France and England, theologians, philosophers and students of the sociology of religion.

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