Evangelical Gothic: The English Novel and the Religious War on Virtue from Wesley to Dracula

Erscheinungsjahr 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8139-4340-4
Verlag: UNIV OF VIRGINIA PR

Buch, Englisch, 272 Seiten, Hardback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: Victorian Literature & Culture

Evangelical Gothic explores the bitter antagonism that prevailed between two defining institutions of nineteenth-century Britain: Evangelicalism and the popular novel. Christopher Herbert begins by retrieving from near oblivion a rich anti-Evangelical polemical literature in which the great religious revival, often lauded in later scholarship as a "moral revolution," is depicted as an evil conspiracy centered on the attempted dismantling of the humanitarian moral culture of the nation. Examining foundational Evangelical writings by John Wesley and William Wilberforce alongside novels by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Bram Stoker, and others, Herbert contends that the realistic popular novel of the time was constitutionally alien to Evangelical ideology and even, to some Extent, took its opposition to that ideology as its core function. This provocative argument illuminates the frequent linkage of Evangelicalism in nineteenth-century fiction with the characteristic imagery of the Gothic–with black magic, with themes of demonic visitation and vampirism, and with a distinctive mood of hysteria and panic.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Herbert, Christopher

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Religionswissenschaft Religionswissenschaft Allgemein Religionsphilosophie, Philosophische Theologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Religionsphilosophie, Philosophische Theologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft

Über Autor(innen)

Christopher Herbert is the Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University and the author, most recently, of War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma.