British romanticism and the Catholic question : religion, history, and national identity, 1778-1829

The debate over extending full civil rights to British and Irish Catholics not only preoccupied British politics but also informed the romantic period's most prominent literary works. This book offers the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of Catholic Emancipation, one of the romantic period's most contentious issues. The debate over extending full civil rights to British and Irish Catholics not only preoccupied British politics but also informed the romantic period's most prominent literary works. This book offers the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of Catholic Emancipation, one of the romantic period's most contentious issues. British Romanticism and the Catholic Question offers the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of Catholic Emancipation, one of the romantic period's most contentious issues. The debate over extending full civil rights to British and Irish Catholics elicited a prolonged political and cultural conflict about the nation's religious and historical identity. It engaged the period's most prominent writers, including S.T. Coleridge, Elizabeth Inchbald, Walter Scott, P.B. Shelley, and William Wordsworth. Beginning with the 1778 Catholic Relief Act, the book follows debates over the Catholic Question across parliamentary speeches, periodical writing, and political cartoons and through the genres of the national tale, epic poetry, the historical novel, and romantic drama. British Romanticism and the Catholic Question argues that while the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act removed the confessional state's legislative apparatus, the regulation of religious difference passed into culture and reshaped the nineteenth century's approach to religious minorities and toleration in the British nation and empire Front Matter....Pages i-xi Introduction: The Spirits of the Age....Pages 1-13 The Purgatorial Politics of the Catholic Question....Pages 14-51 History, Sympathy and Sectarianism in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story....Pages 52-86 Wordsworth and Superstition....Pages 87-118 Shelley’s Conflicted Campaign for Catholic Emancipation....Pages 119-147 Scott’s Ivanhoe and the Saxon Question....Pages 148-181 Conclusion: ‘The Anxious Hour’ — England in 1829....Pages 182-196 Back Matter....Pages 197-224 "The meticulous research and probing readings in Michael Tomko's book show how unsettling the issue of Catholic Emancipation was for the major writers of the Romantic periods. It is a stunning contribution to our larger sense of the complexity surrounding issues of toleration and secularization; still more, it makes the most convincing case yet for Catholicism's centrality in Romantic politics and literary production."--Professor Mark Canuel, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA