{"product_id":"9780813950891","title":"Reading Character after Calvin : Secularization, Empire, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel by David Mark Diamond","description":"How Calvinist theology helps us read characters in the early British novel, shedding new light on the origins of modern secularism The strangeness of fictional characters in the eighteenth-century novel has been well documented. They are two-dimensional yet complex; they suggest unstable correspondences between the external and the internal. In Reading Character after Calvin, David Mark Diamond traces the religious genealogy of such figures, arguing that two-dimensionality reproduces through form a model of interpretation that originates in Calvinist Protestant theology.    In Calvin's teachings, every person possessed a spiritual status as saved or damned, and their external features ostensibly reflected this inward condition. This belief, however, was always haunted by the possibility of a discrepancy between the two. Diamond shows how Calvinism survives in the pages of early novels as a guide to discerning religious hypocrisy and, eventually, distinctions related to imperial race-making. He tracks the migration of Calvinist character detection from its original, sectarian contexts to the worlds of eighteenth-century fiction, revealing the process by which religion came unbound from doctrinal orthodoxy and was grafted onto the ambition of racialized global dominion.    Analyzing a diverse set of texts, Diamond offers a fresh account of both how literary character worked and how it works to naturalize, question, or critique the violence of empire.\u003cbr\u003eBinding: Paperback \/ softback","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56295014170997,"sku":"9780813950891","price":27.95,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780813950891.jpg?v=1762766849","url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/products\/9780813950891","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}