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

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.

Kevin Seidel is an Associate Professor of English literature at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia.