Making the relationship between the religious and the secular a special object of inquiry represents less a new way of thinking about the role of religion in literary studies, as Michael W. Kaufmann contends, than a return to the status quo. This essay articulates that status quo by examining recent work on the history of the novel in English in light of Vincent Pecora's book Secularization and Cultural Criticism. Next, it contrasts Pecora's approach to Talal Asad's in Formations of the Secular. Finally, the essay briefly describes some of the terrain between the religious and the secular in the novel that Asad leaves unexplored in his criticism.
By grappling with secular and religious approaches to Defoe's fiction, this essay describes the theory of fiction that Defoe writes his way toward during the course of his three-book Crusoe novel, which includes The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and The Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The essay sets out to rediscover irony in the Crusoe novel itself—particularly the irony that gathers in its most religiously charged scenes—rather than looking for it, as most critics do, in the historical gap between our secular age and the late Puritan age of Defoe. Next, the essay finds the fullest expression of Defoe's procedures as a novelist in the parable of the atheists at the end of Serious Reflections, rather than in the prefaces that begin the three Crusoe books. In that concluding parable, Defoe finally reveals his ambitions as a novelist, plotting the exposure of his characters' fear and gullibility in regard to the supernatural in order to open them up to a greater sense of divine providence.
This essay reexamines the literary-historical situation of The Pilgrim's Progress , part one and two, in light of recent work on its transnational reception history by Isabel Hofmeyr. The way African writers have used Pilgrim's Progress turns out to be deeply analogous to the way Bunyan uses the Bible. The book, scroll, and letters that appear in Pilgrim's Progress work together to disclose three interrelated circuits of literacy--moral, legal, domestic--operating in late-seventeenth-century conceptions of "the Book." Bunyan combines these circuits, none simply religious or secular, to make his fiction an entertainment, in this world, of the world to come.
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.
This essay criticizes two prevailing ways of thinking about the relationship between the secular and the religious—the way of enmity and the way of paradox—and affirms a third, more open-ended approach to the secular that looks to literature for what William Connolly calls “mundane transcendence.” The essay then shifts the focus of critical attention from the representation of religion in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Orhan Pamuk’s Snow to their representation of “the secular.”
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