Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part I THE SUBJECT BROACHED: OTHERNESS, EPISTEMOLOGY, AND ETHICS
- Part II ETHICS WITHOUT GOD, OR, CAN “IS” BECOME “OUGHT”?
- Part III LITERATURE, SECULARITY, AND THE QUEST FOR OTHERNESS
- Chapter 7 Realism
- Chapter 8 Dickens, secularism, and agency
- Chapter 9 The heartbeat of the squirrel
- Chapter 10 Real toads in imaginary gardens, or vice versa
- Epilogue
- Index
Chapter 8 - Dickens, secularism, and agency
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part I THE SUBJECT BROACHED: OTHERNESS, EPISTEMOLOGY, AND ETHICS
- Part II ETHICS WITHOUT GOD, OR, CAN “IS” BECOME “OUGHT”?
- Part III LITERATURE, SECULARITY, AND THE QUEST FOR OTHERNESS
- Chapter 7 Realism
- Chapter 8 Dickens, secularism, and agency
- Chapter 9 The heartbeat of the squirrel
- Chapter 10 Real toads in imaginary gardens, or vice versa
- Epilogue
- Index
Summary
It would be silly and demonstrably untrue to argue that the novel is an inevitably secular form. Religion, in a myriad of ways, gets affirmed in a myriad of novels. And yet the novel as a form tends to resist the pressures put upon it by many writers to transcend the limits of the “secular” world. Fully fleshed narratives demand the kind of details that embody and flesh out ideas and faiths and inexplicable spiritual mysteries. The Victorian novel, written in the midst of culture-wide conflicts about just such matters, tends toward the secular even as it insists – as it so often does – on the providential order of things. In constant tension between the conventions and intentions of its worldliness and its entirely understandable aspirations beyond the worldly, Victorian fiction, I want after all to argue, is a secular form if ever there was one.
To make a clinching case for this proposition, it would be necessary to treat in some detail a wide variety of Victorian fiction well beyond the established canon and take into account the enormous popularity of religiously inclined narratives: Dinah Mulock Craik might then have to figure as importantly as Charlotte Brontë, Mrs. Oliphant as Thackeray, Maria Corelli as Trollope. One would have to confront Newman's two novels, Callista and Loss and Gain. But any study of this problem would also obviously require close attention to Dickens, and particularly to his most overtly religious novel, Little Dorrit.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Realism, Ethics and SecularismEssays on Victorian Literature and Science, pp. 210 - 244Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008