This book is the first comparative study of its kind to explore at length the French and English Catholic literary revivals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It compares individual and societal secularization in France and England and examines how French and English Catholic writers understood and contested secular mores, ideologies and praxis, in the individual, societal and religious domains. It also addresses the extent to which some Catholic writers succumbed to the seduction of secular instincts, even paradoxically in themes which are considered to be emblematic of...