Abstract

Scholars have long agreed that the Evangelical movement had a powerful effect on political, economic, gender, class, and racial ideologies in nineteenth-century Britain. And yet a protracted critical silence has implicitly labeled the novels of that movement as unworthy of study, despite the immense popularity of such novels with nineteenth-century readers. This essay traces the critical constructs and ideological commitments that have rendered Evangelical narratives so distasteful to twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary critics. It argues that a vital component of their critical neglect is scholars' coding of both the Evangelical movement and its fictions as simultaneously too "masculine"—paternalistic, imperialistic, liberal humanist—and too "feminine"—transparent, naïve, unself-aware. This gender coding, which has been used to justify the banishment of Evangelical novels to the margins of literary studies, betrays scholars' deep but unacknowledged mistrust of modern readers and writers who refuse to be "emancipated" from their "pre-modern" commitment to religion.

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