{"product_id":"reading-character-after-calvin-secularization-empire-and-the-eighteenth-century-novel-9780813950891","title":"Reading Character After Calvin: Secularization, Empire, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel","description":"\u003cb\u003eHow Calvinist theology helps us read characters in the early British novel, shedding new light on the origins of modern secularism\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e 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 \u003ci\u003eReading Character after Calvin\u003c\/i\u003e, 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e 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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e 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\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eDavid Mark Diamond\u003c\/b\u003e is Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Georgia.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"University of Virginia Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50648640192786,"sku":"9780813950891","price":35.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_e2ccb9b9-6ba0-4657-bbdc-1d14bd56172c.jpg?v=1733246212","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/reading-character-after-calvin-secularization-empire-and-the-eighteenth-century-novel-9780813950891","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}