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

Challenging concepts of religion and secularism, this book shows the English novel rising with the English Bible, not after it.

Kevin Seidel (Author)

9781108792165, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 29 February 2024

338 pages
22.8 x 14.9 x 1.8 cm, 0.5 kg

'Seidel's monograph represents a fascinating challenge to the narrative of secularisation. Lucidly arguing for the interrelationship between novel reading and Bible reading, [it] is itself an impressive reading of the Bible's place in the eighteenth- century novel. Researchers interested in the formation of the novel and graduate students of eighteenth-century fiction and literary history will find much insightful work in this generous and careful book.' Hamish John Wood, The Shandean

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]