![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The novelist is not a theologian or a philosopher, but within the enclosed world of Victorian fiction the matter of theology and the nature of good and evil are examined after the disappearance of God. In the fiction of Dickens, this contention is explored together with the responsibility of the reader as stories are told. While theology may sometimes hamper the reader of fiction, in Victorian novels God may be absent while deeply theological issues remain to be explored and responded to.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. See Miller, The Disappearance of God.
2. Miller, The Form of Victorian Fiction, 30.
3. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding, 48.
4. Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, 53.
5. Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, 692.
6. Ibid., 657.
7. See note 4 above 31.
8. See further, Barry Qualls, The Secular Pilgrims of Victorian Fiction (CUP, 1982).
9. Nietzsche, The Geneaology of Morals, 299.
10. See, Immanuel Kant, Political Writings. Ed. Hans Reiss (CUP, 1970).
11. Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God, 207.
12. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction.
13. Sanders, Introduction to Barry Lyndon, ix.
14. Trollope, Thackeray, 71.
15. Quoted in Sanders, Introduction to Barry Lyndon, xv.
16. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 323. See also, Gordon N. Ray, The Buried Life (Harvard, 1952), pp. 28ff.
17. Iser, The Implied Reader, 275.
18. Eagleton, Sweet Violence. Barker, The Culture of Violence, 213.
19. Simon, Pity and Terror, 145.
20. Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, 333.
21. Webster, Introduction to The Mayor of Casterbridge, vi.
22. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 188.
23. James, The Golden Bowl, 29.
24. James, The Art of the Novel, 51.
25. Jefferson, Henry James, 42.
26. James, The Portrait of a Lady, 590–1.
27. Hauerwas, Dispatches from the Front, 58–79.
28. See note 2 above 138.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
David Jasper
David Jasper is professor emeritus of the University of Glasgow, where he was formerly professor of literature and theology. He holds degrees from the universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Durham and an honorary doctorate in theology from the University of Uppsala. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.