Bible and Novel: Narrative Authority and the Death of God

Bible and Novel develops a new context for reading later Victorian fiction, using it to illuminate the increasingly perplexed and confusing issue of 'secularization' and recent negotiations of the 'post-secular.'

The Victorian novel acquired greater cultural centrality as the authority of the scriptures and of traditional religious teaching seemed to be declining. Did the novel supplant the Bible? The novelists often adopted or participated in a broadly progressive narrative of social change which can be seen as a secular replacement for the theological narrative of "salvation history" and the waning authority of biblical narrative. Victorian fiction seems in some ways to enact the process of secularization. But contemporary religious resurgence in various parts of the world and postmodern skepticism about grand narratives have challenged and complicated the conventional view of secularization and questions are being asked as to whether post-Christian Victorian fiction can be read in the same manner.

In our increasingly secular society novel-reading is now more popular than Bible-reading. Norman Vance looks at how this may have occurred through an analysis of four late-Victorian novelists: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Mary Ward and Rider Haggard. Does the novel in their hands take the place of the Bible? Can apparently secular novels still have religious significance? Can they make new imaginative sense of some of the religious and moral themes and experiences to be found in the Bible? Do Eliot and her successors anticipate some of the insights of modern theology and contemporary investigations of religious experience? Do they call in question long-standing rumors of the death of God and the triumph of the secular? Vance suggests answers to these questions in his novel perspective.