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Religious issues played a prominent role in Victorian England and had a profound influence on the culture of that period. In Theology and the Victorian Novel, J. Russell Perkin shows that even the apparently secular world of the realist novel is shaped by the theological debates of its time.

Beginning with a wide-ranging introduction that explains why a theological reading of Victorian fiction is both rewarding and timely, Perkin also addresses religion's return to prominence in the twenty-first century, confounding earlier predictions of its imminent demise. Chapters on William Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, Charlotte Yonge, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy are followed by a concluding discussion of Mary Ward and Walter Pater that relates Pater's Marius the Epicurean to postmodern theology and shows how it remains a religious classic for our own time.

Informed by extensive knowledge of the religion and culture of the period, Theology and the Victorian Novel significantly alters the way that the Victorian novel should be read.