Overview

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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9781443802949

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Those lacking first-hand experience of Methodism from the inside have often had to content themselves with the fictional Methodists to be encountered with the fictional Methodists to be encountered in British novels. [...] The main section of the book is an indispensible guide to its subject. Rev Preb Norman Wallwork Methodist Recorder, 9.12.2016

Author Information

David Dickinson taught secondary school English in Newcastle upon Tyne before training for the Methodist ministry. He has researched and written in the field of theology and literature since the early 1990s and ministered in churches since the late 1980s. The author of The Novel as Church (Baylor University Press, 2013), he was Director of the St Albans Centre for Christian Studies from 2005 to 2013, and now serves as minister of Trinity Church Sutton, Surrey.

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