The Lure of Babylon : Seven Protestant Novelists and Britain's Roman Catholic Revival - Hardcover

Lure of Babylon explores the effect of Catholicism on the imagination and fiction of Protestant novelists in Britain during the decades surrounding Catholic Emancipation (1829) and the reestablishment of the Roman Catholic Church in England (1850). This book examines eight novels, by popular writers such as Scott, Dickens, and Eliot, that both capture and critique the anti-Catholicism pervasive in the national imagination. It examines the bigotry evident in plot and rhetoric, then goes on to investigate the ways in which Catholic ritual, iconography, mysticism, and music frequently fascinate the very novelists who decry the religion of Rome. Some of the authors in this study use Catholic settings or characters to explore sensibilities deemed unacceptable, and others use them as vehicles for projecting their own doubts and fears. Whatever personal or artistic purposes Catholicism serves in a novel, it does so discreetly, in the subtleties of metaphor, image, characterization, and narrative. The result is often highly imaginative writing that expresses the authors' own complex perspectives on Catholicism.