Rethinking the Secular Origins of the Novel

Literary histories of the novel tend to assume that religion naturally gives way to secularism, with the novel usurping the Bible after the Enlightenment. This book challenges that teleological conception of literary history by focusing on scenes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fiction where the Bible appears as a physical object. Situating those scenes in wider circuits of biblical criticism, Bible printing, and devotional reading, Seidel cogently demonstrates that such scenes reveal a great deal about the artistic ambitions of the novels themselves and point to the different ways those novels reconfigured their readers' relationships to the secular world. With insightful readings of the appearance of the Bible as a physical object in fiction by John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Scott, Frances Sheridan, and Laurence Sterne, this book contends that the English novel rises with the English Bible, not after it.

Author: Kevin Seidel
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 02/29/2024
Pages: 337
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9781108792165

About the Author
Seidel, Kevin: - Kevin Seidel is an Associate Professor of English literature at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

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