Reading Character after Calvin (eBook)

Secularization, Empire, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel

David Mark Diamond (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024
278 Seiten
University of Virginia Press (Verlag)
978-0-8139-5090-7 (ISBN)

Infos

How Calvinist theology helps us read characters in the early British novel, shedding new light on the origins of modern secularism The strangeness of fictional characters in the eighteenth-century novel has been well documented. They are two-dimensional yet complex; they suggest unstable correspondences between the external and the internal. In Reading Character after Calvin, David Mark Diamond traces the religious genealogy of such figures, arguing that two-dimensionality reproduces through form a model of interpretation that originates in Calvinist Protestant theology. In Calvin's teachings, every person possessed a spiritual status as saved or damned, and their external features ostensibly reflected this inward condition. This belief, however, was always haunted by the possibility of a discrepancy between the two. Diamond shows how Calvinism survives in the pages of early novels as a guide to discerning religious hypocrisy and, eventually, distinctions related to imperial race-making. He tracks the migration of Calvinist character detection from its original, sectarian contexts to the worlds of eighteenth-century fiction, revealing the process by which religion came unbound from doctrinal orthodoxy and was grafted onto the ambition of racialized global dominion. Analyzing a diverse set of texts, Diamond offers a fresh account of both how literary character worked and how it works to naturalize, question, or critique the violence of empire.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.4.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Maße: 150 x 150 mm
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
• Schlagworte: abolitionist novels • Allegory • Amelia • A Simple Story • Black Atlantic • British colonialism • British Novel • British Suriname • Calvinist Protestantism • Catholicism • Charles Taylor • Charlotte Dacre • Christian hermeneutics • Christian imperialism • critical methods • critique • Elizabeth Inchbald • Gender • Gothic fiction • Henry Fielding • History of Three Fingered Jack • Ideology critique • ignatius sancho • James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw • James Hogg • John Bunyan • Laurence Sterne • liberal-secular politics • Literary Character • Literary History • Natural Theology • nova effect • Obeah • Obi • Oroonoko • Ottoman Empire • Ottoman North Africa • Penelope Aubin • Postsecular • predestination • Presentism • Private Memoirs and True Confessions of a Justified Sinner • Quobna Cugoano • Race • racial difference • Racialization • Religious Conversion • Religious pluralism • Religious violence • Saba Mahmood • Secularism • Semiotics • Sexuality • Slavery • Talal Asad • The Holy War • The Noble Slaves • The pilgrim's progress • Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery • Tom Jones • Tristram Shandy • two-dimensional characters • Typology • William Earle • Woman of Colour • Zofloya, or The Moor
• ISBN-10: 0-8139-5090-2 / 0813950902
• ISBN-13: 978-0-8139-5090-7 / 9780813950907