Bible and novel [electronic resource]

This study seeks to develop a new context for reading later Victorian fiction, specifically the work of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Mary Ward and Rider Haggard. With Eliot and her successors the Victorian novel acquired greater cultural centrality, just as the authority of the scriptures and of traditional religious teaching seemed to be declining. The book considers whether serious, allegedly secular novelists supplanted the Bible or whether they anticipated some of the insights of contemporary theologians and writers of fiction by reimagining and reformulating rather than abandoning essentially religious themes and insights.