David Dickinson

Reading the novels of George Eliot, Arthur Quiller-Couch, Barry Unsworth, and others, as a Methodist, David Dickinson offers a colourful picture of Methodists in British fiction since the close of the nineteenth century. In the first century and a half of the denomination’s influence, many novels treated Methodist themes, settings and characters – and several authors were themselves Methodist – but as Methodism declined, its appearances in modern English literature diminished. Nevertheless, it retains a strong, if paradoxical, presence in popular imagination, fed in part by its fictional depiction. Yet Alive? argues that, despite, or perhaps because of, the process of secularisation, novels depicting Methodists play an important role in literature’s ongoing exploration of spiritual, religious and theological themes, and that Methodists have much to learn from the way authors see them.

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