Belief and the Novel: Secularism’s Theology

Lori Branch
Lori Branch
University of Iowa

From Ian Watt, Michael McKeon, and Catherine Gallagher to Georg Lukács, George Levine, and James Wood, influential theorists have from a variety of positionalities linked the novel to secularization. In this lecture I both extend and trouble this commonplace, showing how the novel is intimately related to modern secularism and for that very reason cannot help but harbor a certain religiousness, in the particular ways secularism configures and seeks to contain it. Taking Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Dracula (1897) as important icons of the evolution of the English novel and ranging from Austen and Dickens to contemporary novels of James Wood and Marilynne Robinson, I consider why the novel should be such a seemingly necessary form for secularism, and what happens when writers take up the novel to explore experiences of belief. These questions lead me to describe the novel as a theological genre and liturgical form for both believers and unbelievers experiencing secularization, living within the immanent frame, and grappling to give an account both of that experience and of a Christianity that from Scholasticism to the Reformation has been plagued by the intertwined problems of the nature of belief and of knowledge, and of the justice and mercy of God.