Epilogue

Abstract

The premises of the book are reprised in the Epilogue to argue for an intensification of religious themes as the Protestant downgrading of spiritual mediating practices leads to a hollowed out secular materialism, requiring a more sympathetic recuperation of Catholic sacramentality, even to establish the spiritual Protestant subject. Recent Gothic fiction by Sarah Perry, Andrew Hurley, and James Robertson illustrates the ongoing importance of Whig, Catholic, and Scottish Calvinist modes of Gothic in contemporary fiction, which questions the limits of the natural.