Theology and literature in the age of Johnson : resisting secularism / edited by Melvyn New and Gerard Reedy.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction / Melvyn New -- Novelistic redemption and the history of grace: practical theology and literary form in Richardson's Pamela and Fielding's Joseph Andrews / Donald R. Wehrs -- Oxford Methodists (1733; 1738): the purloined letter of John Wesley at Samuel Richardson's press / John A. Dussinger -- Henry Fielding straddles a moving theme / Regina Janes -- Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and the problem of heaven / E. Derek Taylor -- Intellectual background to Johnson's Life of Browne: a study of Johnsonian construction / Robert G. Walker -- "But philosophy can tell no more": Johnson's Christian moralism and the genre of Rasselas / Patrick Müller -- Johnson's fallen world / Steven Scherwatzky -- Aesthetics and theology in Samuel Johnson's Life of Isaac Watts and Prayers and meditations (1785) / Katherine Kickel -- Providence, futurity, and typology in Oliver Goldsmith's The vicar of Wakefield / Nicholas Seager -- Divine and human love: letters between John Norris and Mary Astell, Laurence Sterne and Eliza Draper / Geoff Newton -- Tristram Shandy and the devil / Ryan J. Stark -- Methodists on the move in The spiritual Quixote / Brett C. McInelly -- "A very agreable way of thinking": devotion and doctrine in Boswell's religion / Paul Tankard -- Bluestockings and religion / Deborah Heller -- "Through a glass darkly": Edmund Burke, political theology, and literary allusion / Frans De Bruyn -- Bible in the dock: Thomas Erskine, Thomas Paine, and the trial of The age of reason / Roger D. Lund -- Novel as the art of secular scripture: Mary Wollstonecraft's feminist gospel / Nathalie Zimpfer.

"Theology and Literature in the Age of Johnson: Resisting Secularism contains seventeen essays exploring the complex relationships between literary intentions and theological concerns of authors writing in the second half of the eighteenth century. The diversity of literary forms and subjects, from Fielding and Richardson to Burke and Wollstonecraft, is matched by a diversity of approaches and theologies. To argue that the age "resisted secularism" is by no means to argue that resistance was blindly doctrinal or rigidly uniform. The many ways secularism could be resisted is the subject of the collection."--Publisher's website.