Neat bows

I'm approaching the end of my reading for the book chapter/article/conference presentation I want to write next semester, and am attempting to ward off the impending threat of a Dialectical Neat Bow.  (Yes, this is a new philosophical term.)  The bc/a/cp is on fictions of sixteenth-century martyrdom--there's some accidental continuity here with the Anne Boleyn project--which I'm using to exemplify some trends in the Victorian theory and practice of explicitly religious, didactic historical fiction.  The problem arises from theological groupings: there are the anti-Catholic (emphatically so) Protestants of various degrees of Dissent, evangelicalism, or relatively Low Churchmanship; the anti-Protestant (with greater or lesser degrees of emphasis) Catholics; and the irenic High Church Anglicans.  Now, these theological differences all have repercussions for a host of other fiction-related issues that are not first and foremost theological.  There are struggles over the definition of historical consciousness, over the nature and function of language, over the process of interpretation, over the implications of narrative structure, and so forth.  This is all very interesting (er, to me, anyway) and potentially quite complex. 

It's the complexity that leads to the dreaded Dialectical Neat Bow.  The most logical way for me to keep the audience from throwing the book/journal/me under the wheels of an onrushing Mack truck is to organize my own argument according to the aforementioned theological groups.  Ergo, you've got your anti-Catholic Protestants over here (thesis), your anti-Protestant Catholics over there (antithesis), and your "can't we all get along?" High Church Anglicans chiming in at the end (synthesis).*   Chronologically, however, this arrangement obscures the considerable overlap in their respective positions: the Protestants write these novels consistently throughout the century; the High Church Anglicans take a brief stab at them during the early Victorian period, then try again much later on; the Catholics start having a go during the mid-Victorian period.  In other words, the High Church folks don't successfully "resolve" any of the quarrels (although several historians have pointed out that anti-Catholicism overall starts to run out of steam by the end of the century).  Moreover, I suspect that the twenty-first century reader may find those nice Anglicans more appealing, "progressive," or even "liberal," in ways that are not, perhaps, exactly apt in historical context--especially because there's often a noticeable conflict in their work between the narrator's didactic instructions to the reader (sympathize with both sides, because they're both fighting for what they believe to be right) and how the characters actually behave (if Protestant, probably quite badly).

*--Presumably, I could make matters even more difficult by introducing Jewish novelists--the more religious controversy the merrier!--but since this chapter is focusing expressly on the sixteenth-century UK, the Jews are temporarily off the hook.  They'll show up in another chapter, however.