Kevin Seidel | Eastern Mennonite University (original) (raw)
Uploads
Books by Kevin Seidel
Cambridge University Press, 2021
Literary histories of the novel tend to assume that religion naturally gives way to secularism, w... more Literary histories of the novel tend to assume that religion naturally gives way to secularism, with the novel usurping the Bible after the Enlightenment. This book challenges that teleological conception of literary history by focusing on scenes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fiction where the Bible appears as a physical object. Situating those scenes in wider circuits of biblical criticism, Bible printing, and devotional reading, Seidel cogently demonstrates that such scenes reveal a great deal about the artistic ambitions of the novels themselves and point to the different ways those novels reconfigured their readers' relationships to the secular world. With insightful readings of the appearance of the Bible as a physical object in fiction by John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Scott, Frances Sheridan, and Laurence Sterne, this book contends that the English novel rises with the English Bible, not after it.
Articles by Kevin Seidel
New Literary History, Jan 1, 2007
Book Reviews by Kevin Seidel
![Research paper thumbnail of Review: “Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture, 1660–1780, by Howard D. Weinbrot,” in _1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era_, 22 [forthcoming]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/37446222/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](
Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Jan 1, 2005
Conference Papers by Kevin Seidel
Reader-response theory has a long history. It stretches back to the rhetoricians of antiquity, wh... more Reader-response theory has a long history. It stretches back to the rhetoricians of antiquity, who argued about how audiences were moved by various figures of speech, topics, and turns of narrative. Words, artfully arranged, they thought, had power over their audience.
Talks by Kevin Seidel
2015 Baccalaureate Address, Eastern Mennonite University. On Genesis 12:1, John 14:2, with help f... more 2015 Baccalaureate Address, Eastern Mennonite University. On Genesis 12:1, John 14:2, with help from a letter by John Keats.
Conference Presentations by Kevin Seidel
Three ways to think about the relationship between the secular and the religious, with brief exam... more Three ways to think about the relationship between the secular and the religious, with brief examples from William Connolly and David Foster Wallace.
Papers by Kevin Seidel
Christianity and Literature, 2018
This essay criticizes two prevailing ways of thinking about the relationship between the secular ... more This essay criticizes two prevailing ways of thinking about the relationship between the secular and the religious—the way of enmity and the way of paradox—and affirms a third, more open-ended appr...
Rethinking the Secular Origins of the Novel, 2021
Literary histories of the novel tend to assume that religion naturally gives way to secularism, w... more Literary histories of the novel tend to assume that religion naturally gives way to secularism, with the novel usurping the Bible after the Enlightenment. This book challenges that teleological conception of literary history by focusing on scenes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fiction where the Bible appears as a physical object. Situating those scenes in wider circuits of biblical criticism, Bible printing, and devotional reading, Seidel cogently demonstrates that such scenes reveal a great deal about the artistic ambitions of the novels themselves and point to the different ways those novels reconfigured their readers' relationships to the secular world. With insightful readings of the appearance of the Bible as a physical object in fiction by John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Scott, Frances Sheridan, and Laurence Sterne, this book contends that the English novel rises with the English Bible, not after it.
Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 2005
The salutary and unsettling effect of these two books by Talal Asad-an anthropologist of Muslim b... more The salutary and unsettling effect of these two books by Talal Asad-an anthropologist of Muslim beliefs and practices-is to make strange the "religion" of the West, as it is conceived by various tribes of the academy, and to make almost savage the concept of "the secular" that is so precious to natives of Western liberalism. Quietly powerful and carefully argued, Asad's essays move with extraordinary skill between fields as diverse as history, literature, moral philosophy, politics, psychology, religious studies, and sociology. Anyone working in these fields and grappling with questions of religion can learn a great deal from Asad, but where he breaks new ground is in his analysis of the secular, bringing to light the way it depends on and circumscribes the conceptual boundaries of religion. Genealogies of Religion is a collection of eight essays, all previously published except for one, which are held together with the help of a good index and cumulative list of references. In the introduction, Asad says that his "explorations into Christian and post-Christian history" are "motivated by the conviction that its conceptual geology has profound implications for the ways in which non-Western traditions are able to grow and change" (1). The essays are organized into pairs in four usefully named sections-"genealogies," "archaisms," " translations," "polem
Cambridge University Press, 2021
Literary histories of the novel tend to assume that religion naturally gives way to secularism, w... more Literary histories of the novel tend to assume that religion naturally gives way to secularism, with the novel usurping the Bible after the Enlightenment. This book challenges that teleological conception of literary history by focusing on scenes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fiction where the Bible appears as a physical object. Situating those scenes in wider circuits of biblical criticism, Bible printing, and devotional reading, Seidel cogently demonstrates that such scenes reveal a great deal about the artistic ambitions of the novels themselves and point to the different ways those novels reconfigured their readers' relationships to the secular world. With insightful readings of the appearance of the Bible as a physical object in fiction by John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Scott, Frances Sheridan, and Laurence Sterne, this book contends that the English novel rises with the English Bible, not after it.
New Literary History, Jan 1, 2007
Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Jan 1, 2005
Reader-response theory has a long history. It stretches back to the rhetoricians of antiquity, wh... more Reader-response theory has a long history. It stretches back to the rhetoricians of antiquity, who argued about how audiences were moved by various figures of speech, topics, and turns of narrative. Words, artfully arranged, they thought, had power over their audience.
2015 Baccalaureate Address, Eastern Mennonite University. On Genesis 12:1, John 14:2, with help f... more 2015 Baccalaureate Address, Eastern Mennonite University. On Genesis 12:1, John 14:2, with help from a letter by John Keats.
Three ways to think about the relationship between the secular and the religious, with brief exam... more Three ways to think about the relationship between the secular and the religious, with brief examples from William Connolly and David Foster Wallace.
Christianity and Literature, 2018
This essay criticizes two prevailing ways of thinking about the relationship between the secular ... more This essay criticizes two prevailing ways of thinking about the relationship between the secular and the religious—the way of enmity and the way of paradox—and affirms a third, more open-ended appr...
Rethinking the Secular Origins of the Novel, 2021
Literary histories of the novel tend to assume that religion naturally gives way to secularism, w... more Literary histories of the novel tend to assume that religion naturally gives way to secularism, with the novel usurping the Bible after the Enlightenment. This book challenges that teleological conception of literary history by focusing on scenes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fiction where the Bible appears as a physical object. Situating those scenes in wider circuits of biblical criticism, Bible printing, and devotional reading, Seidel cogently demonstrates that such scenes reveal a great deal about the artistic ambitions of the novels themselves and point to the different ways those novels reconfigured their readers' relationships to the secular world. With insightful readings of the appearance of the Bible as a physical object in fiction by John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Scott, Frances Sheridan, and Laurence Sterne, this book contends that the English novel rises with the English Bible, not after it.
Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 2005
The salutary and unsettling effect of these two books by Talal Asad-an anthropologist of Muslim b... more The salutary and unsettling effect of these two books by Talal Asad-an anthropologist of Muslim beliefs and practices-is to make strange the "religion" of the West, as it is conceived by various tribes of the academy, and to make almost savage the concept of "the secular" that is so precious to natives of Western liberalism. Quietly powerful and carefully argued, Asad's essays move with extraordinary skill between fields as diverse as history, literature, moral philosophy, politics, psychology, religious studies, and sociology. Anyone working in these fields and grappling with questions of religion can learn a great deal from Asad, but where he breaks new ground is in his analysis of the secular, bringing to light the way it depends on and circumscribes the conceptual boundaries of religion. Genealogies of Religion is a collection of eight essays, all previously published except for one, which are held together with the help of a good index and cumulative list of references. In the introduction, Asad says that his "explorations into Christian and post-Christian history" are "motivated by the conviction that its conceptual geology has profound implications for the ways in which non-Western traditions are able to grow and change" (1). The essays are organized into pairs in four usefully named sections-"genealogies," "archaisms," " translations," "polem
Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700, 2013
The Encyclopedia of British Literature 1660-1789
Daniel Defoe’s fictional narrators talk often about God’s providence but not usually to appeal to... more Daniel Defoe’s fictional narrators talk often about God’s providence but not usually to appeal to an overarching social or natural order, to solve problems of theodicy, or to claim special divine attention. In the Bible scene near the beginning of Defoe’s novel Journal of the Plague Year (1722), a passage of scripture opened to by chance convinces the narrator, H.F., to stay in London and protect his business during the plague. This scene primes Defoe’s readers to recognise later in the novel divine providence acting not through so much as with creaturely agents, human and nonhuman.