Chapter 11 The Religious Novel By Claudia Stokes Conventional literary historical wisdom dictates that American religious fiction reached its peak of popularity and influence in the mid-nineteenth century, with the flowering of sentimental novels, such as Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Maria Susanna Cummins's The Lamplighter (1854), that depict the powers of Christian faith to abet female maturation and personal reform. The decline of this literary genre after the American Civil War, this story continues, coincided with the ascent of realism and naturalism as the late-century's premier aesthetic modes, a shift taken to signal the replacement of cloying literary piety with a toughminded insistence on secular empiricism and documentary verisimilitude. However, to study the religious fiction of the late nineteenth century is to discern how faulty this enduring literary historical narrative really is. Sentimental novels remained popular well after the war, and, on the whole, religious novels actually rose in popularity in the late century, with novels such as Lew Wallace's Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880) and Charles Sheldon's In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? (1897), which respectively sold copies numbered in the millions. Though nineteenthcentury religious fiction is typically remembered as a genre composed largely by women for female readers, the most successful, respected writers working in the genre were in fact latecentury men, such as Edward Eggleston and E. P. Roe as well as Sheldon and Wallace, whose fiction was oriented specifically to male readers. And though late-century religious fiction was predominantly Protestant in its leanings, it appeared within a variety of aesthetic modes, realism
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.