Natural designs: Skepticism, romanticism, and religion from Hume to Austen (David Hume, Jane Austen)

Romantic criticism has assumed that romanticism, as the first "moment" of modernity, inaugurates a narrative of secularization. Yet the fragmentation and compartmentalization of human experience that we associate with modernity does not obtain for the romantic era. By interpreting romantic-era texts through the lens of the argument from design, this dissertation revises the secularization thesis.; The popular hegemony of design during the romantic age is a result of its ability to respond to both skeptical critique and social and political events. Located at the convergence of public and private, design offers to mediate between science and religion, between institution and individual, between general and particular---in short, between those very things that modernity claims to drive apart.; Through readings of eighteenth century and romantic writers---David Hume, Anna Barbauld, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Paley, William Wordsworth, and Jane Austen---this dissertation explores the various means by which design moves from a theological argument to a site of ideological and formal transformations. Understanding this shift as taking place at the intersection of the social and the personal, this study analyzes how designedness is worked into romantic cultural production.