Types and Tropes: History and Moral Agency in Evangelical Inspirational Fiction

Using as exemplars novels of evangelical inspirational fiction writer Francine Rivers, this article explores how Christian faith is represented as manifest in the emotional lives of characters in inspirational fiction novels. These novels invoke a particularly evangelical way of anchoring Biblical scripture to a modified "typological" understanding of history, that, in turn, anchors characterological claims to moral agency which are grounded in "tropological" or "moral" forms of scriptural interpretation. This narrative organization or "chronotope" models a kind of faith-informed, emotionally centered practice of viewing one's own life and situation that that is widely mobilized in American evangelical culture.