A Simple Story
A01=David Mark Diamond
abolitionist novels
allegory
Amelia
Author_David Mark Diamond
Black Atlantic
British colonialism
British novel
British Suriname
Calvinist Protestantism
Category=NHB
Catholicism
Charles Taylor
Charlotte Dacre
Christian hermeneutics
Christian imperialism
critical methods
critique
Elizabeth Inchbald
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
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
or The Moor
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
Product details
- ISBN 9780813950891
- Weight: 272g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Apr 2024
- Publisher: University of Virginia Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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.
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.
David Mark Diamond is Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Georgia.
