Courses

Although the novel seems like a secular form, some of the earliest examples in English can be strangely religious. Authors of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century prose fiction often claimed to write from a religious perspective or at least to be in step with religious ideals, and many of them wrote about unabashedly religious topics. We will spend a little over half of this seminar reading and discussing early British novels, from Samuel Richardson’s moment through to Jane Austen’s, that address the reality of evil, the nature of faith, the hope for an afterlife, the need for spiritual community, and the difficulty of religious pluralism. Among our particular concerns will be the role of place in representations of different religious traditions and the overlap between romance plots and conversion stories. Instead of treating such topics as exclusively things of the literary past, we will read our older novels alongside a few later Anglophone works, written between 1945 and today, that continue to use the novel form for the atypical purposes of portraying religious practice and religious identity and reassessing religion’s role in modern life.