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Title: Reading Character after Calvin Condition: New Subtitle: Secularization, Empire, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel Author: David Mark Diamond Format: Hardback EAN: 9780813950884 ISBN: 9780813950884 Publisher: University of Virginia Press Genre: History Release Date: 01/04/2024 Description: 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. Language: English Country/Region of Manufacture: US Item Height: 229mm Item Length: 152mm Item Width: 32mm Item Weight: 272g Release Year: 2024 Missing Information?
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