Abstract
This dissertation proposes a Catholic history of the eighteenth-century English novel. Situating realist fiction as a form deeply imbricated in a metaphysical conflict over the truth of human creations, I draw upon the iconic to describe the ways in which texts such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Jane Barker’s patchwork fictions, Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, and Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story position themselves as fictions and as art. Rather than identifying a specifically Catholic literary form, I argue that Catholicism – both its doctrines and the discourses surrounding it – set the terms through which fiction writers conceptualized their formal innovations in the eighteenth century.
Committee Chair
Wolfram Schmidgen
Committee Members
Geremy Carnes, Joseph Loewenstein, William McKelvy, Abram Van Engen,
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Author's Department
English and American Literature
Document Type
Dissertation
Date of Award
Spring 5-15-2018
Language
English (en)
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7936/K7CC104M
Recommended Citation
Tucker, Margaret Louise, "Iconic Works: How Catholicism Shaped Eighteenth-Century English Fiction" (2018). Arts & Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 1594.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.7936/K7CC104M
Comments
Permanent URL: https://doi.org/10.7936/K7CC104M