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Title: | If Romantic Historicism Shaped Modern Fundamentalism, Would that Count as Secularization? |
Author(s): | Underwood, Ted |
Subject(s): | British literary history
historicism secularization dispensational fundamentalism romanticism |
Abstract: | Over the last decade, scholars have been reconsidering the way secularization organizes literary history. This essay suggests that recent advances have depended on a tacit distinction between the institutional and intellectual narratives once fused under the rubric of secularization. It also underlines the value of that distinction through a case study, examining the way dispensational fundamentalism has combined historicism with an anti-secular institutional agenda. Dispensationalism is now best known because of its prominence in the United States, where it spread the doctrine of a pre-tribulational Rapture. But the movement’s origins lie in Britain, and its leaders were distinguished by a radically historical approach to the Bible. Edward Irving, for instance, discussed historical criticism with friends S. T. Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle, insisted on a contextual interpretation of Scripture, and saw the Gentile church as a provisional institution. Irving’s fundamentalist historicism is hard to distinguish from the historicism that critics have identified as a secularizing legacy of Romantic literature. But the social consequences of his views diverged markedly from the consequences associated with historicism in, say, the Broad Church -- suggesting that institutional and intellectual aspects of secularization aren’t as thoroughly fused as literary historians sometimes assume. |
Issue Date: | 2010 |
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
Citation Info: | European Romantic Review 21.3 (2010): 327-43. Published version: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10509585.2010.484631#preview |
Genre: | Article |
Type: | Text |
Language: | English |
URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/2142/48907 |
Publication Status: | published or submitted for publication |
Peer Reviewed: | is peer reviewed |
Date Available in IDEALS: | 2014-04-17 |