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

Description

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. Cover Half-title page Title page Copyright page Contents List of Figures List of Tables Appendixes Acknowledgments Introduction Part I Rethinking the Secular at the Origins of the English Novel Chapter 1 A Secular for Literary Studies Chapter 2 The Bible, the Novel, and the Veneration of Culture Part II Versions of Biblical Authority Chapter 3 Sanctifying Commodity: The English Bible Trade around the Atlantic, 1660–1799 Chapter 4 Prop of the State: Biblical Criticism and the Forensic Authority of the Bible Chapter 5 Object of Intimacy: Devotional Uses of the Eighteenth-Century Bible Part III Uses of Scripture for Fiction Chapter 6 Traveling Papers: Pilgrim’s Progress and the Book Chapter 7 Surprised by Providence: Robinson Crusoe as Defoe’s Theory of Fiction Chapter 8 Resilient to Narrative: Clarissa after Reading Chapter 9 Breaking Down Shame: Narrating Trauma and Repair in Tristram Shandy Conclusion Appendixes Notes Works Cited Index