Rethinking the Secular Origins of the Novel: The Bible in English Fiction 1678–1767

Author:   Kevin Seidel (Eastern Mennonite University, Virginia)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
ISBN:  

9781108491037


Pages:   280
Publication Date:   25 March 2021
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Manufactured on demand   Availability explained
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Rethinking the Secular Origins of the Novel: The Bible in English Fiction 1678–1767


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Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Kevin Seidel (Eastern Mennonite University, Virginia)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 2.10cm , Length: 22.90cm
Weight:   0.621kg
ISBN:  

9781108491037


ISBN 10:   1108491030
Pages:   280
Publication Date:   25 March 2021
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  College/higher education ,  Professional & Vocational ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand   Availability explained
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

Introduction; Part I. Rethinking the Secular at the Origins of the English Novel: 1. A secular for literary studies; 2. The Bible, the novel, and the veneration of culture; Part II. Versions of Biblical Authority: 3. Sanctifying commodity: the English Bible trade around the Atlantic, 1660–1799; 4. Prop of the state: biblical criticism and the forensic authority of the Bible; 5. Object of intimacy: the devotional uses of the eighteenth-century Bible; Part III. Uses of Scripture for Fiction: 6. Traveling papers: Pilgrim's Progress and the book; 7. Being surprised by providence: Robinson Crusoe as Defoe's theory of fiction; 8. Resilient to narrative: Clarissa after reading; 9. Breaking down shame: narrating trauma and repair in Tristram Shandy.

Reviews

'Throughout this monograph, the reader is comfortingly guided ... through the convoluted relationship between the sacred and the secular. Seidel presents a well-reasoned argument that highlights the complex patterns and interactions between the physical presence of the Bible in the emerging genre of the novel. It is worth reading for anyone interested in the eighteenth-century rise of the novel, secularization and literature, and the increasingly popular religious history of the eighteenth century.' Rebekah Andrew, Eighteenth Century Fiction


'Throughout this monograph, the reader is comfortingly guided … through the convoluted relationship between the sacred and the secular. Seidel presents a well-reasoned argument that highlights the complex patterns and interactions between the physical presence of the Bible in the emerging genre of the novel. It is worth reading for anyone interested in the eighteenth-century rise of the novel, secularization and literature, and the increasingly popular religious history of the eighteenth century.' Rebekah Andrew, Eighteenth Century Fiction


Author Information

Kevin Seidel is an Associate Professor of English literature at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

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