If Romantic Historicism Shaped Modern Fundamentalism, Would that Count as Secularization?

Underwood, Ted

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/48907 Copy

Description

Title

If Romantic Historicism Shaped Modern Fundamentalism, Would that Count as Secularization?

Author(s)

Underwood, Ted

Issue Date

2010

Keyword(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.

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/48907

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