Church, state, and modernization: Literature as gentlemanly knowledge after 1688

Methodologically, this chapter belongs neither to literary criticism, nor to literary history as conventionally understood, nor to cultural studies, even in its historical modes. It is, instead, a form of historical sociology, which considers literature as a social institution with specifiable material interests, organizational structures and social functions rather than simply as a body of writing. But a caveat needs to be entered at once. The moment I am concerned with, the long eighteenth century, is, of course, when the term “literature” came to cover not written knowledge available to the literate in general but the kind of writing produced specifically by men and women of letters – and, in particular, imaginative writing. From the sociological perspective, this change of “literature’s” denotation

is a consequence of a mutation of social function that the literary field underwent across the century.1 To put a familiar case succinctly: literature became less centered on polite learning, including classical scholarship, and more centered on sympathetic imagination and the suspension of disbelief. At the same stroke, it also claimed a greater role in moral education. As it thereby extended its capacity for social agency and engagement, new readerships, particularly among women, were created alongside new genres and hierarchies of genres. By the time of Walter Scott’s death in 1832, realist prose fiction had become dominant.2