Victorian Conversion Narratives and Reading Communities

Emily Walker Heady

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138272347
• eBook ISBN: 9781317002222
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 How a Capitalist Converts: Dickens’s Theology and the Realism of Dombey and Son
• 2 “Must I Render an Account?”: The Ethics of Genre in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
• 3 Gambling on Conversion: The Problem of Relativism in Daniel Deronda
• 4 To Sum Up, To Judge: The Aesthetics of Truth in Heart of Darkness
• 5 The Afterlife of Oscar Wilde’s Conversion, Or What Self-Consciously Literary College Students Say on Facebook
• Works Cited
• Index