Anti-Catholicism and nineteenth-century fiction

Susan M. Griffin

"Susan Griffin uncovers and analyzes the important but neglected body of anti-Catholic fiction written between the 1830s and the beginning of the twentieth century in both Britain and America. Griffin examines Anglo-American anti-Catholicism and reveals how this sentiment was distilled to provide Victorians with a set of political, cultural, and literary tropes through which they defined themselves as Protestant and therefore normative. Griffin examines and broad range of writers including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Kingsley, Henry James, Charlotte Bronte and a variety of lesser-known authors. She traces how nineteenth-century writers constructed a Church of Rome against which "America," "Britain," and "Protestant" might be identified and critiqued. This book will be essential reading for scholars working on British Victorian literature as well as nineteenth-century American literature; it will be of interest to scholars of literary, cultural, and religious studies."--BOOK JACKET.