Religion in the English Novel: From Jane Austen to Margaret Atwood

Romanticism marked a dramatic turning point in philosophy and aesthetics. The shift from Classicism to Romanticism to Modernism and its Posts is paralleled in the shift from Kant to Hegel to Nietzsche to Derrida. The central notions of the Enlightenment: nature, progress, rationalism, and rejection of the irrational are opposed by the central notions of the Counter-Enlightenment: relativism, vitalism, anti-rationalism, and sense of the organic. Then there is the idea of freedom at the heart of the West's religious and secular vocabularies. The authors discussed in this study ask their readers to consider the question of freedom and constraints upon it. For some, freedom is found in Christianity; for others, Christianity is freedom's enemy.