This book interrogates the relations between Reformation ideas of plain style, the
coupling of simplicity with a hermeneutic transparency (as expressed in simple
Englishness in Victorian and early twentieth-century literature), and the visceral aversion
to the non-simple expressed in Islamophobia in contemporary England.
Chapters:
1. The English Reformation: Spenser, Milton and the Protestant Aesthetic
2. Secularizing the Protestant Aesthetic: Wordsworth, Eliot and Hardy
3. Contemporary Englishness and the Protestant Aesthetic
4. English Dispositions and Islamophobia