In the essay below, Reynolds looks at Roman Catholic fiction and its character and themes, both before 1850, when it used theological and historical polemics to persuade, and after 1850, when it began to assimilate the prevailing anti-theological secularism.

Below, Griffin discusses the figure of the escapee in the anti-Catholic literature of the early nineteenth century. She relates questions of veracity concerning the escapees' claims to the larger question of the role of women in nineteenth-century American culture.

In the following excerpt, Welter summarizes some of the enduring themes of the nativist crusade of nineteenth-century America, and illustrates some of its institutional arguments by focusing on the popular anti-Catholic tract Awful Disclosures, by Maria Monk

In this excerpt, Franchot examines Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" to demonstrate how elements of popular anti-Catholic tales of convent captivity became transformed in more literary tales of inquisitional and shipboard imprisonment.

In this essay, originally published in 1960, Davis analyzes various themes of anti-Catholic, anti-Masonic, and anti-Mormon literature in nineteenth-century America, suggesting that it tended to subvert the established order it claimed to protect by liberating certain irrational impulses against an imagined enemy.