Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century: A Literary History of Atheism

by James Reeves

Although there were no self-avowed British atheists before the 1780s, authors including Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Sarah Fielding, Phebe Gibbes, and William Cowper worried extensively about atheism's dystopian possibilities, and routinely represented atheists as being beyond the pale of human sympathy. Challenging traditional formulations of secularization that equate modernity with unbelief, Reeves reveals how reactions against atheism rather...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1108835902
• ISBN13: 9781108835909
• Release Date: July 2020
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"