Coda

Summary

The book has argued – via keywords and close readings – that certain forms of literary representation derive from their author’s concerns about what we now call secularization. It posits that cultural concepts (faith, worlds, nostalgia), forms of mentation (indulgence, figuring), literary forms (novelistic narration, historical fiction), and even fiction and modes of reading themselves result from the conservative orientation of their authors. In so doing, it argues for treating the secular and the postsecular as relevant not just to politics or religion but also to literary forms and innovation, theories of mind, and conceptualizations of temporality and mentation more generally. In fact, a central insight of the book is that the postsecular is motivated not necessarily by political or religious opposition – or even by a renegotiation of the relationship between the religious and the secular – but rather by changes wrought by secularization across the spheres of cultural and social life, and it argues that the literary sphere provided both the site and the methods for that process. This study has also demonstrated that secularization and liberalism are not separate from postsecularization and conservatism – rather, they are interdependent, as this study’s keywords suggest: Faith and indulgence, transformed for a secular system, make possible belief and toleration; imagining worlds and reading literary history are embedded in secular spatiality and temporality, even as they reveal the offenses and limitations wrought by these secular categories; passivity and the revolution/nostalgia dynamic both keep alive and keep in check the liberal fiction of human agency. The conservative and the postsecular are thus constantly in tension with the liberal and secular. This is why it is no coincidence that the concerns of people not well served by liberalism – not just royals but also women and enslaved people – occur repeatedly in this study. This is also why the two characteristics that most distinguish these conservative writers – their opposition to revolution and their innovative literary formations – are connected.