The Persistence of Catholicism: How Eighteenth-Century English Writers Imagined a Minority Religious Community.

TL;DRAbstract

This dissertation studies the engagement of five major eighteenth-century English writers with their nation’s minority Catholic community. Though at the margins of English civil and social life, English Catholics continued to attract converts and remained politically and culturally important throughout the century. Anxieties about the place of Catholics in England suffuse the literature of the period, but they have been obscured by misleading narratives of the rise of a secular, tolerant modernity. This dissertation closely considers plays, novels, and poems whose concerns about English Catholicism have been mostly overlooked, and it investigates the political, cultural, and deeply personal work these texts perform. A central feature of that work is a refiguring of practices of the representation of Catholics and Catholicism. Even hostile writers recognize that the portrayal of Catholics must move beyond the simplistic demonization of traditional imagery. Playing with generic and forma

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