Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century: A Literary History of Atheism by James Bryant Reeves

Abstract

Reviewed by: Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century: A Literary History of Atheism by James Bryant Reeves Lisa O'Connell James Bryant Reeves, Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century: A Literary History of Atheism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2020). Pp. 260. $99.99 cloth. That God is dead is a commonplace of modern literary history and, at least until recently, of the secularization and modernization narratives that have shaped our understanding of Enlightenment. Yet, despite the presence of many atheists in eighteenth-century fiction, the "literary history of atheism" has largely gone untold. In Godless Fictions in the Eighteenth Century, James Reeves aims to change that. He offers a fresh, post-secular take on the literary representation of religious non-belief in Britain, arguing that it animated a broad sweep of early fiction, from Tory satire and verse essay to sentimental-moral fiction and pre-Romantic poetry. Reeves's five author-focused chapters make the case that atheism functioned as a richly "generative literary concept" (5–6) and that it did so precisely as a reviled Other for eighteenth-century fictional worlds. The book begins with twinned chapters on Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, for whom the rise of atheistic materialism signaled the degeneracy and dullness of the age. Paradoxically, atheism energized each author's most excoriating satires, including The Dunciad and Gulliver's Travels. The analysis continues into less well-traversed literary territory, with chapters on Sarah Fielding and Phebe Gibbes, mid-late-century female writers of didactic novels (David Simple, Lady Louisa Stroud, and Hartly House, Calcutta), whose polite marriage plots, Reeves insists, were no less reliant on godless worlds and characters, set here against author-sanctioned modes of sympathy, sociability, and (female) community tied to Christian belief. Pivoting back to canonical verse, the book's concluding chapter examines a selection of William Cowper's poems and hymns, in which his abiding opposition to atheism grounds an emergent Romantic critique of slavery, imperialism, and oppression. It is fair to say that, for Reeves, atheism's literary history unfolds under the dispensation of an English Anglican nation-state for which unbelief was the antithesis of a godly, ordered society. Accordingly, British authors became "preoccupied with unbelief," he argues, either as a force of imaginative chaos or as a reliable fictional means "to interrogate discourses of selfhood, sociability, tolerance and empire" (5). Only belatedly, under the influence of avowedly atheist writers like Percy Shelley (whose 1810–11 epistolary prank "The Necessity of Atheism" is the subject of the book's coda) as well as the promise of radical political transformation fueled by revolutionary critiques of religion and absolute authority, did the literary treatment of atheism detach from belief and godliness and connect to modern secularization narratives. Even as it unsettles secularization narratives, however, Godless Fictions does not seek to historicize the literary representation of unbelief by framing it within received intellectual histories of atheism or materialism, or even within the politics of the English state which regulated Christian orthodoxy and promoted broader moral reform and outreach efforts. Instead, Reeves's key analytical move is to insist on the primarily affective nature of literary responses to unbelief, noting that "[r]ather than arguing against atheism on rational or epistemological grounds, eighteenth-century literature often rejects it out of pure reflexive disdain" (7). Early in his study, Reeves tells us that, while eighteenth-century commentators and divines [End Page 339] routinely conflated atheism with Christian heterodoxy (Deism, Socinianism, anti-Trinitarianism, etc.), this was not the case in the literary sphere where the atheist emerged as a reviled fictional figure, native to satiric-dystopic speculative worlds and the minor characterology of the novel. Reeves's affect-oriented approach yields two important insights. The first is that British fiction's recurring negative treatment of godless worlds and characters—materialists, dunces, rakes, freethinkers, misanthropes, and the like (all reviled and almost all male)—is subtended by a steady and insistent theism. But this is not a theism tied to religious creed or to Christian-theological argument. It is, rather, as Reeves notes, precognitive, affective, and intensely imaginative, defined by its hostility to unbelief rather than by any positive or prescriptive conception of the divine. A...