Religious romance archetypes structure the secular Western novel’s conventions.

Evidence

According to Frye, the mythological universe has two aspects: “In one aspect it is the verbal part of man’s own creation, what I call a secular scripture.… The other is, traditionally, a revelation given to man by God or other powers beyond himself.… Somehow or other, the created scripture and the revealed scripture … have to keep fighting each other, like Jacob and the angel, and it is through the maintaining of this struggle, the suspension of belief between the spiritually real and the humanly imaginative, that our own mental evolution grows.” This is a good description of what we might call the persistence of religion in the novel form, something that helps to make Minaret more comprehensible in terms of Western narrative traditions. … The same idea, of falling and then being lifted up, is to be found in both Christian and Islamic traditions and is also prevalent in Minaret, where Najwa’s life after her family’s fall in the coup is marked by a descent in status. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 503

Categorization

• XREF: This gives the reader a ready-made frame: Najwa’s descent-and-ascent arc maps directly onto the romance archetype — a critical vocabulary they can test against Changez in The Reluctant Fundamentalist (also a ‘fall’ narrative of reversed fortune).
• DEFINE: Defines ‘the persistence of religion in the novel form’ via Frye — secular vs. revealed scripture kept in productive struggle.