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

• Published in: Bunyan studies no. 26; pp. 120 - 124
• Main Author: Seager, Nicholas
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.2022
• Subjects: 18th century; Bible; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); Cultural change; Defoe, Daniel (1660-1731); Ethics; Fiction; Fielding, Henry (1707-1754); Novels; Reading; Reading acquisition; Religion; Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768); Text analysis; United Kingdom > UK; England
• ISSN: 0954-0970

[...]it presents a cultural history of the Bible during the long eighteenth century (chapters 3-5), which contends that Scripture retained authority and high visibility as a 'prop of the state' and an instrument of intimate personal devotion. The textual analysis, especially in the second half of the book, largely bears up Seidel's contentions that 'we learn how to read these early novels from the Bibles that appear in them', and that eighteenth-century novelists were 'leveraging certain kinds of biblical authority', using Scripture creatively for 'artistic innovation' (5, 10). [...]Carol Stewart's excellent study, The EighteenthCentury Novel and the Secularization of Ethics (2010), investigates how novelists in the decades after Richardson sought to fill a perceived decline in the authority of the Anglican Church.