The English novel tradition marginalizes religion in favor of materialist plotting

Evidence

The challenge of producing a religious novel may appear, on the face of it, to be simply a matter of writing sympathetically about religious characters and perspectives. However, in the Western (and specifically English) novelistic and critical tradition—within which postcolonialism occupies an important but contested space—one must contend with what is often taken to be the three-hundred-year-old drift away from spirituality and faith toward a materialist working out of narrative plot and human choices. … God does not intervene directly, and where the guiding hand of Providence is seen, it tends to be equally explicable in terms of coincidence or, in other cases, heavy-handed omniscient meddling by the author. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 499

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: Connects to Watt’s ‘formal realism’ and the rise-of-the-novel thesis — useful background when situating Hamid and Naqvi within or against the English novel tradition.
• DEFINE: Defines what the secular novelistic tradition assumes about religion’s marginalization — the baseline against which a genuinely religious novel like Minaret must be read.

Related

• The novel form carries three centuries of secular individualism shaping its possibilities (similarity 0.86)
• The secularization thesis fails to account for religious difference in fiction (similarity 0.83)
• The English novel’s religious narrative structures survive absorbed into its secular themes (similarity 0.83)
• Religious narrative structures persist inside secular novels as absorbed plot paradigms (similarity 0.83)
• The novel form carries religious shape and imagery even within secular fiction (similarity 0.82)
• Amis frames the novel as rational and individualist against religion’s monological irrationality (similarity 0.82)
• Secular and sacred narrative traditions interpenetrate and never diverged (similarity 0.82)
• Novels that critique Islamophobia still get co-opted by the market they critique. (similarity 0.82)
• Secular critique struggles with novels that affirm rather than question religious orthodoxy (similarity 0.82)
• The novel form resists being repurposed for transcendental religious belief (similarity 0.82)
• The secularization thesis fails to account for literature like Minaret (similarity 0.81)
• The religious and secular are co-constitutive, not opposed spheres (similarity 0.80)
• Formal and thematic features jointly determine a novel’s relation to Islamophobia (similarity 0.80)
• The novel form is wrongly assumed to embody post-Enlightenment Western culture (similarity 0.80)
• Liberal novelists cast literature itself as a core Western value threatened by Islam (similarity 0.79)