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Victorian Conversion Narratives and Reading Communities
Author(s): Emily Walker Heady (Author)
- Publisher: Routledge
- Publication Date: 23 May 2013
- Edition: 1st
- Language: English
- Print length: 182 pages
- ISBN-10: 1409453774
- ISBN-13: 9781409453772
Book Description
Because Victorian authors rarely discuss conversion experiences separately from the modes in which they are narrated, Emily Walker Heady argues that the conversion narrative became, in effect, a form of literary criticism. Literary conventions, in turn, served the reciprocal function as a means of discussing the nature of what Heady calls the ‘heart-change.’ Heady reads canonical authors such as John Henry Newman, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde through a dual lens of literary history and post-liberal theology. As Heady shows, these authors question the ability of realism to contain the emotionally freighted and often jarring plot lines that characterize conversion. In so doing, they explore the limits of narrative form while also shedding light on the ways in which conversion narratives address and often disrupt the reading communities in which they occur.
Editorial Reviews
Review
’Heady’s book demonstrates the centrality of the religious idea of conversion to Victorian authors whose modern readers are not themselves religious. …valuable and rewarding…’ Journal of Theological Studies
About the Author
Emily W. Heady is Dean of the College of General Studies and Professor of English at Liberty University, USA. Her recent work has appeared in The Journal of Narrative Theory, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and Prose Studies.
