Godless fictions in the eighteenth century : a literary history of atheism /

Reeves (Texas State Univ.) explores a paradox in 18th-century thought: the plenitude of fictional atheists in novels, plays, poetry, sermons, and satires, despite the near-total absence of atheists in Great Britain and Ireland. This obsession, Reeves argues, was not so much about the almost nonexistent nonbelief as it was about limning what constituted belief itself. In particular, Enlightenment theories of sympathy and sociability were anchored on the existence of God: atheism led to "uncertainty and disorder" (p. 61), "chaos and human conflict" (p. 90), and an absolute, atomized individualism. For authors like Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and William Cowper, the atheist was such an antisocial monster that even non-Christian belief systems, though still maligned, looked better in contrast (with Pope most sympathetic to beliefs that were not his own Catholicism). Women writers like Phebe Gibbes and Sarah Fielding, meanwhile, tied atheism to disordered forms of masculinity, especially predatory sexuality; Gibbes and Cowper, moreover, linked atheism to slavery and imperial economic exploitation. A coda examines how two actual atheists, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Thomas Hogg, playfully inverted the rhetoric of anti-atheism in their correspondence with inventor Ralph Wedgwood. A lucid, richly contextualized perspective on Enlightenment religion and sociability as well as literature. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. --Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, SUNY College at Brockport