Reading Character After Calvin: Secularization, Empire, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel

How Calvinist theology helps us read characters in the early British novel, shedding new light on the origins of modern secularism

The strangeness of fictional characters in the eighteenth-century novel has been well documented. They are two-dimensional yet complex; they suggest unstable correspondences between the external and the internal. In Reading Character after Calvin, David Mark Diamond traces the religious genealogy of such figures, arguing that two-dimensionality reproduces through form a model of interpretation that originates in Calvinist Protestant theology.

In Calvin’s teachings, every person possessed a spiritual status as saved or damned, and their external features ostensibly reflected this inward condition. This belief, however, was always haunted by the possibility of a discrepancy between the two. Diamond shows how Calvinism survives in the pages of early novels as a guide to discerning religious hypocrisy and, eventually, distinctions related to imperial race-making. He tracks the migration of Calvinist character detection from its original, sectarian contexts to the worlds of eighteenth-century fiction, revealing the process by which religion came unbound from doctrinal orthodoxy and was grafted onto the ambition of racialized global dominion.

Analyzing a diverse set of texts, Diamond offers a fresh account of both how literary character worked and how it works to naturalize, question, or critique the violence of empire.

David Mark Diamond is Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Georgia.