A Novel Hope? Universal Salvation, the Victorian Sentiment, and the Role of the Novel
Digital Verbum Edition
Overview
Christians today are often struggling with many of the same theological problems that Victorians were, especially regarding hell and the God of love. One answer to these questions found in nineteenth-century Britain was the seemingly surprising reappearance of the early Christian eschatological theory of universalism, the belief that all of humanity will be saved. Even though this re-emergence has already been acknowledged by scholars of Victorianism, its extent has been widely underestimated. This book then aims to describe why universalism became an increasingly viable option in a time of growing religious doubt, and especially how it established itself in and with the help of the century’s fiction, not only in the more overtly universalist novels of Gaskell and Anne Bronte, but also across works ranging from Dickens, Gissing, Linton, and Oliphant, all the way to Ward and Wells.
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- Explores Universal Salvation in Victorian Theology
- Shows how the Victorian “crisis of faith” drove theological innovations and popular religious imagination
- Highlights the role that the Victorian novel played in reflecting, shaping, and spreading theological ideas about doubt, deconversion, and the possibility of universal redemption
- The Shaking of the Heaven and the Earth - Of Religious Revolutions
- The Victorian Crisis of Faith and the Quest for Answers
- Literature Selection and Subsequent Structure - A Roadmap
- What Universalism is: “The Wider Hope” in its General Theological Context
- The Revival of Universalism: Of Religious Revolutionists and Religious Revolutions
- Universalism, the Victorian Theological Context, and the Victorian Rationale
- Anglican Universalism and the Victorian Mainstream
- Driving Religious Change: "natural science, historical criticism, [and] moral feeling" in the Religious Novel
- The Decline of Traditional Religion in Victorian Fiction and Theology
- Towards Apostasy and Religious Reconversion: The Victorian Novel’s Master-Narrative of a Well-Mapped Way to a New Faith
- Sin, Hell, and the Restoration of the All Things - Universal Salvation in the Victorian Novel
Part I: Introduction
Part II: The Victorian Rationale and the Revival of Universalism in Victorian Theology
Part III: Towards Apostasy and Reconversion
Part IV: Conclusion
“Lively and erudite, Woodley’s study of the eschatological dimension of British literature and theology sheds new light on the status of universalism in the Victorian period. Woodley shows that universalism—the belief that all will be saved in the end—became a widely accepted solution to the unsettling impact of biblical criticism and new scientific discoveries.”
—Bernard Lightman, Distinguished Research Professor, York University
“This book is a fascinating and ground-breaking exploration of the unraveling of traditional concepts of hell in the Victorian novel and in the daring exploration of alternative theological conceptualizations of hell and salvation in such fictional works. In this welcome contribution, Woodley sheds fresh light on a surprisingly neglected subject.”
—Robin A. Parry, author of A Larger Hope? Universal Salvation from the Reformation to the Nineteenth Century