CFP: Representing Religious Characters in Nineteenth-Century Fiction: 

9 September 2019



For this one-day symposium, hosted by Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre, Birmingham, we invite papers on the representation of religious characters in nineteenth-century fiction. Literature of the period abounds with such figures: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Gentle Boy”; George Eliot’s Seth and Adam Bede and Daniel Deronda; Charles Dickens’ Mrs Clennam and Reverend Stiggins; Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Father Ferapont; Anthony Trollope’s Bishop of Elmham. Nineteenth-century literature played a part in endorsing, questioning or satirising religious viewpoints and practices in a time of rapid developments in science, including, most famously, evolutionary theory. However, a strict separation of sacred and secular, as Mark Knight and Emma Mason argue, is unhelpful because it downplays the importance of theological questions in everyday life and in the realms of history, politics, philosophy and science. We are interested, therefore, in how depictions of religious characters enable discussions of broader nineteenth-century culture and how faith and rationality, logic and emotion, enthusiasm and common sense bleed into other. 

It follows that an author’s decision to include characters who practise religion does not guarantee a rigorous literary engagement with theology. Religion might be treated as primarily a social or historical phenomenon, evolving over time and varying in different cultural and political contexts; the figures of the clergyman, the radical, the puritanical schoolmaster, the devout wife or the persecuted dissenter might be examined purely as social beings, with their beliefs of interest primarily for their roles in forming, transforming or even destroying familial, friendly or romantic relationships. Moreover, exaggerated religious characters – one thinks, in the American context, of the Quaker idyll of the Halliday’s house in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or at the opposite end of the spectrum the murderous Friend Nathan Slaughter in Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods – are often the most efficacious in revealing anxieties about national identity and the dominant political issues of the day. 



Topics for proposed papers might include, but are not limited to:



-	representations of religious children (Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, or the waif narratives of Silas Hocking)

-	the relationship between religion and political and/or social activism

-	a comparison of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ depictions

-	representations of missionaries

-	“enthusiasm” in various senses, as religious or emotional fervour, as unconventional religious idea or practice, as excessive commitment to individual conscience

-	representations of cults or quasi-religious groupings (Nathaniel Hawthorne’s satire of a Transcendental community in The Blithedale Romance, for example)

-	the role of religious characters in empire 

-	the importance of religious dissent in forming national identity

-	representations of religious hypocrisy

-	religious characters and community formation / cohesion



Please send abstracts of 250-300 words, together with a short biography, to the co-organisers: Dr. James Peacock (Senior Lecturer in English and American Literatures, Keele University) and Dr. Betty Hagglund (Senior Lecturer for the Centre for Research in Quaker Studies, Woodbrooke): [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask]

The closing date for proposals is 24 May 2019



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