Religious narrative structures persist inside secular novels as absorbed plot paradigms

Evidence

However, I would suggest that the structuring principles of the religious narrative do not actually disappear but are instead absorbed into the themes, idioms, and plot paradigms of the novel and continue to be evident to this day. For instance, the novel’s ongoing concern with appropriate ethical behavior has its origins in the religious roots of narrative. Significantly, even as agnostic an author as George Eliot in the mid–nineteenth century was concerned primarily with authority and right behavior—albeit in a world without God—to such an extent that Comtean positivism blends with Feuerbach’s so-called religion of humanity to make kinds of redemption central to novels such as Adam Bede (1859), Silas Marner (1861), and Middlemarch (1871–1872). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 500

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the analytical claim that ‘secular’ novels retain religious structuring principles — a key piece of the critical vocabulary for framing Hamid and Naqvi within a longer religious-narrative tradition.
• XREF: Connects to Watt’s ‘formal realism’ and the rise-of-the-novel genealogy that Morey is revising; directly useful as the hinge for framing how contemporary Islamicate-inflected novels inherit religious plot structures. — connects to: Theological compromise concepts mediate between romance narrative and capitalist historicity — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 3058; Conflating literary and religious canon distorts genuinely secular hybrid texts — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1148