Alison Conway – författare

A revelatory reading of the British novel that considers interfaith marriage, religious toleration, and the ethics of sociability.Bringing together feminist theory, novel criticism, and religious studies, Alison Conway's Sacred Engagements advances a postsecular reading of the novel that links religious tolerance and the eighteenth-century marriage plot. Conway explores the historical roots of the vexed questions that interfaith marriage continues to raise today. She argues that narrative wields the power to imagine conjugal and religious relations that support the embodied politics crucial to a communal, rather than state-sponsored, ethics of toleration.Conway studies the communal and gendered aspects of religious experience embedded in Samuel Richardson's account of interfaith marriage and liberalism's understandings of toleration in Sir Charles Grandison. In her readings of Frances Brooke, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Maria Edgeworth, Conway considers how women authors reframe the questions posed by Grandison, representing intimacy, authorship, and women's religious subjectivity in ways that challenge the social and political norms of Protestant British culture. She concludes with reflections on Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and the costs of a marriage plot that insists on religious conformity. By examining the complex epistemologies of the interfaith marriage plot, Sacred Engagements counters the secularization thesis that has long dominated eighteenth-century novel studies. In so doing, the book recognizes those subjects otherwise ignored by liberal political theory and extrapolates how a genuinely inclusive tolerance might be imagined in our own deeply divided times.

A revelatory reading of the British novel that considers interfaith marriage, religious toleration, and the ethics of sociability.Bringing together feminist theory, novel criticism, and religious studies, Alison Conway's Sacred Engagements advances a postsecular reading of the novel that links religious tolerance and the eighteenth-century marriage plot. Conway explores the historical roots of the vexed questions that interfaith marriage continues to raise today. She argues that narrative wields the power to imagine conjugal and religious relations that support the embodied politics crucial to a communal, rather than state-sponsored, ethics of toleration.Conway studies the communal and gendered aspects of religious experience embedded in Samuel Richardson's account of interfaith marriage and liberalism's understandings of toleration in Sir Charles Grandison. In her readings of Frances Brooke, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Maria Edgeworth, Conway considers how women authors reframe the questions posed by Grandison, representing intimacy, authorship, and women's religious subjectivity in ways that challenge the social and political norms of Protestant British culture. She concludes with reflections on Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and the costs of a marriage plot that insists on religious conformity. By examining the complex epistemologies of the interfaith marriage plot, Sacred Engagements counters the secularization thesis that has long dominated eighteenth-century novel studies. In so doing, the book recognizes those subjects otherwise ignored by liberal political theory and extrapolates how a genuinely inclusive tolerance might be imagined in our own deeply divided times.

Mind, Body, Motion, Matter investigates the relationship between the eighteenth century’s two predominant approaches to the natural world – mechanistic materialism and vitalism – in the works of leading British and French writers such as Daniel Defoe, William Hogarth, Laurence Sterne, the third Earl of Shaftesbury and Denis Diderot. Focusing on embodied experience and the materialization of thought in poetry, novels, art, and religion, the literary scholars in this collection offer new and intriguing readings of these canonical authors. Informed by contemporary currents such as new materialism, cognitive studies, media theory, and post-secularism, their essays demonstrate the volatility of the core ideas opened up by materialism and the possibilities of an aesthetic vitalism of form.

Formerly a site of study reserved for intellectual historians and political philosophers, scholarship on religious toleration, from the perspective of literary scholars, is fairly limited. Largely ignored and understudied techniques employed by writers to influence cultural understandings of tolerance are rich for exploration. In investigating texts ranging from early modern to Romantic, Alison Conway, David Alvarez, and their contributors shed light on what literature can say about toleration, and how it can produce and manage feelings of tolerance and intolerance.Beginning with an overview of the historical debates surrounding the terms "toleration" and "tolerance," this book moves on to discuss the specific contributions that literature and literary modes have made to cultural history, studying the literary techniques that philosophers, theologians, and political theorists used to frame the questions central to the idea and practice of religious toleration. Tracing the rhetoric employed by a wide range of authors, the contributors delve into topics such as conversion as an instrument of power in Shakespeare; the relationship between religious toleration and the rise of Enlightenment satire; and the ways in which writing can act as a call for tolerance.

This ambitious interdisciplinary study undertakes a new definition of the eighteenth-century novel's investment in vision and visual culture, tracing the relationship between the development of the novel and that of the equally contentious genre of the portrait, particularly as represented in the novel itself. Working with the novels of Richardson, Fielding, Haywood, Manley, Sterne, Wollstonecraft and Inchbald, and the portraits of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Highmore, Hudson, Hogarth, and others, Private Interests points to the intimate connections between the literary works and the paintings. Arguing that the novel's representation of the portrait sustains a tension between competing definitions of private interests, Conway shows how private interests are figured as simultaneously decorous and illicit in the novel, with the portrait at once an instrument of propriety and of scandal. Examining women's roles as both authors of and characters in the novel and the novel's encounters with the portrait, the author provides a new definition of private interests, one which highlights the development of women's agency as both spectacles and spectators.