The Postsecular Restoration and the Making of Literary Conservatism

'Literary critics find it all too easy to equate formal innovation with a radical cast of mind. Corrinne Harol's provocative new study proposes that the very idea of literary form sprang up from underappreciated conservative roots. Harol traces the postsecular all the way back to the seventeenth-century development of secular liberalism, seeing the two modes as entangled from the outset. Whereas emerging secular thought prioritized abstract theory and aspired to universality, postsecular critique stressed local material practice. The result deftly gathered in this book's pages is a version of modern conservatism that not only arrives earlier than expected, fully a century before Edmund Burke's reaction to the French Revolution. It's also a conservatism that's decisively literary, marked (in the work of such counter-revolutionary innovators as Aphra Behn, John Dryden, and Margaret Cavendish) by a propensity to reshape given reality rather than to reinvent reality from scratch. This new strand of postsecular experimentation found its place outside of straightforwardly political and religious domains. The making of literary conservatism was to a surprising extent, Harol persuasively argues, the making of literature itself.' Dustin D. Stewart, Columbia University 'The postsecular does not … need to postdate the process of secularization. The two are closely bound up with one another, as Harol attempts to show through a series of fine-grained interpretative case studies … There is also a striking ambition in the range of material treated here.' Philip Connell, Eighteenth-Century Fiction