Paul Stevens
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198769774
- eISBN:
- 9780191822605
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198769774.003.0029
- Subject:
- Literature, Milton Studies, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
Protestantism’s radical concept of divine grace does not simply disappear with what Weber calls the ‘disenchantment’ of the secular age; it transmutes itself into other complex and powerful cultural ...
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Protestantism’s radical concept of divine grace does not simply disappear with what Weber calls the ‘disenchantment’ of the secular age; it transmutes itself into other complex and powerful cultural defences against fatality, the contingent and unpredictable. Ideas have a habit of migrating in unexpected ways and in this chapter tries to outline one of those migrations: that is, the displacement of grace from religion into class through the reception of Milton in Jane Austen. The focus of the chapter is, then, the way the literature of the Restoration lives on in the inter-textual relationship between Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Paradise Lost (1674), especially as that relationship is mediated through one of Austen’s favourite novels, Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1754). Most importantly, the story the chapter tells is not so much one of disenchantment as one of re-enchantment or the aestheticization of class.Less
Protestantism’s radical concept of divine grace does not simply disappear with what Weber calls the ‘disenchantment’ of the secular age; it transmutes itself into other complex and powerful cultural defences against fatality, the contingent and unpredictable. Ideas have a habit of migrating in unexpected ways and in this chapter tries to outline one of those migrations: that is, the displacement of grace from religion into class through the reception of Milton in Jane Austen. The focus of the chapter is, then, the way the literature of the Restoration lives on in the inter-textual relationship between Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Paradise Lost (1674), especially as that relationship is mediated through one of Austen’s favourite novels, Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1754). Most importantly, the story the chapter tells is not so much one of disenchantment as one of re-enchantment or the aestheticization of class.
