Literary histories of the novel tend to assume that religion naturally gives way to secularism, with the novel usurping the Bible after the Enlightenment. This book challenges that teleological conception of literary history by focusing on scenes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fiction where the Bible appears as a physical object. Situating those scenes in wider circuits of biblical criticism, Bible printing, and devotional reading, Seidel cogently demonstrates that such scenes reveal a great deal about the artistic ambitions of the novels themselves and point to the different ways those novels reconfigured their readers' relationships to the secular world. With insightful readings of the appearance of the Bible as a physical object in fiction by John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Scott, Frances Sheridan, and Laurence Sterne, this book contends that the English novel rises with the English Bible, not after it.

‘Throughout this monograph, the reader is comfortingly guided … through the convoluted relationship between the sacred and the secular. Seidel presents a well-reasoned argument that highlights the complex patterns and interactions between the physical presence of the Bible in the emerging genre of the novel. It is worth reading for anyone interested in the eighteenth-century rise of the novel, secularization and literature, and the increasingly popular religious history of the eighteenth century.’

Rebekah Andrew Source: Eighteenth Century Fiction

‘Seidel’s monograph represents a fascinating challenge to the narrative of secularisation. Lucidly arguing for the interrelationship between novel reading and Bible reading, [it] is itself an impressive reading of the Bible’s place in the eighteenth- century novel. Researchers interested in the formation of the novel and graduate students of eighteenth-century fiction and literary history will find much insightful work in this generous and careful book.’

Hamish John Wood Source: The Shandean