Date of Award

1-1-2023

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of English

Content Description

1 online resource (viii, 231 pages) : illustrations (some color)

Dissertation/Thesis Chair

Paul Stasi

Committee Members

Wendy R Roberts, Richard Barney

Keywords

British, eighteenth-century, form, post-secular theory, theory of novel, English fiction, Religion in literature, Secularism in literature, Postsecularism

Subject Categories

English Language and Literature

Abstract

Abandoned Form rereads the theory of the novel from a post-secular perspective. Since the early 1980’s, theorists such as Nancy Armstrong, Michael McKeon, and Ian Watt have argued that the novel mimics Western civilization’s journey from irrationality to rationality by embracing secular ideologies and abandoning religious ones. Conversely, Abandoned Form contends that the eighteenth-century novel form depends on an inseparable relationship between the religious and the secular. Rather than being independent of religious influence, the eighteenth-century novel utilizes a dialectical engagement of secular and religious forces to create its formal structures. Focusing on the form of the novel, rather than its content, Abandoned Form, departs from other post-secular analyses which tend to search for religious motifs or themes. At the same time, my approach elevates the eighteenth-century novel, often read as a somewhat simplistic forerunner of a more sophisticated nineteenth-century form. I argue that, in fact, recognizing religion’s centrality to Enlightenment culture, allows us to re-imagine both the novel’s origins and the supposedly secular modernity to which it responds. Therefore, Abandoned Form address three important aspects of the secularization thesis as they correlate to definitive features of the novel form—time/plot, space/interiority, and belief/realism through a close reading of novels such as such as Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, the anonymous novel, The Female American; or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield, and Eliza Haywood’s Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze among others.

Download

Share

COinS