England's Secular Scripture: Islamophobia and the Protestant Aesthetic (New Directions in Religion and Literature) - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

England's Secular Scripture seeks to trace Englishness to its roots in England's Protestant past, and more specifically to its aesthetic and literary rooting in Protestant values. Carruthers argues that the formation of English identities in early modern Reformation Protestantism influences English antagonism towards foreign identities, especially evident against Muslims. The book traces the transposing, and secularizing, of Reformation doctrines into a 'Protestant aesthetic' of simplicity, individualism, and rationalism in the literature of Spenser and Milton. Wordsworth, Hardy, Eliot and Orwell, among others, perpetuate this aesthetic, one that continues to shape English mythologies up to the present day. Carruthers sheds light on contemporary Islamophobia, helping us to understand that Englishness is not merely a secular identity (combating what is seen as an irrational fundamentalist identity), but one informed, paradoxically, by Protestant logic and history.

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