Abstract
This dissertation argues that the political campaign to extend civil rights to Catholics (often known as the “Catholic Question” or Catholic emancipation) generated a protracted, contentious debate about Britain’s national and religious identity that precipitated conflicts in romantic era literary politics, troubled the sense of history among romantic writers, and haunted the period’s construction of its own progressive “Spirit of the Age.” Emerging with particular force in literary narratives of the nation’s past, the fundamental cultural contradictions presented by the Catholic Question resulted in the formal fracturing of romantic texts and prompted attempts to articulate a stabilizing via media or middle way between revolutionary “enthusiasm” and Catholic “superstition.” While Catholic emancipation’s advocates hoped to quell Irish Catholic unrest, advance the cause of parliamentary reform, or break the Establishment alliance of Church and State, both opponents (like Southey) and proponents (like Shelley and Byron) were anxious about the prospective “return” of a Catholic Other, often denigrated as primitive or superstitious, into a nation that imagined itself as Protestant, modern, and free. This analysis thus complements studies of the role of romantic era anti-Catholicism in constructing “Britishness,” a sense of national identity that united Britain’s domestic regions and its foreign empire. While critics have examined struggles over internal colonialism and this emerging national ethos among writers from Scotland and Ireland, figures ranging from Edmund Burke to Samuel Taylor Coleridge also labeled the Catholic religious minority a dangerous “nation within the nation.” The broad investigation of this complex religious, literary, and political context also focuses on how genre, poetic form, and narrative structure register and redirect political and cultural transformations in readings of Walter Scott’s historical novel Ivanhoe, Elizabeth Inchbald’s English Catholic proto-national tale A Simple Story, and William Wordsworth’s The Excursion, Essays on Epitaphs, and Ecclesiastical Sketches. Drawing on insights from postcolonial historians, this dissertation argues that even though a form of legal religious tolerance emerged in the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act, romantic literature’s narration of history helped to establish unofficial cultural limits of civil society and exerted powerful pressure on religious minorities to conform to modern “Britishness.”
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