Losses and Gains. Economie della letteratura negli autori cattolici vittoriani: metodi e prospettive di una ricerca

Victorian Catholic writers – though belonging to a “pied” and “dappled” cultural and literary group that has been rarely examined so far as a whole – confronted the contemporary “failure of religion” that scholars consider as “the Victorians’ central immaginative and intellectual experience”, epitomizing it in the relationship between “the breakdown of faith and the growth of realism in fiction”. Their cultural alterity of Catholic writers in the Victorian Age suggests that scholars should apply the emblematic definition of “other victorians” also to them, as it is applied to some other Victorian socio-cultural “minority groups”. In fact, they were irreducible to the main anthropological and epistemological tenets of their epoch and their literary works give neat evidence of this. This paper illustrates the main points and some developmental lines of a research project on their works and days.