The Secular Pilgrims of Victorian Fiction The Novel as Book of Life Qualls

The Secular Pilgrims of Victorian FictionThe Novel as Book of Life\nAuthor(s): Barry V. Qualls\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9780521272018, 978-0521272018\nSynopsis\nThis book examines the attempts of four great Victorians to write what amounted to latter-day 'Pilgrim's Progresses'. Writing in and for an age whose spiritual needs and assumptions differed utterly from those of Bunyan, they produced very different kinds of books from his - but books which still owed as much to the puritan tradition of Pilgrim's Progress and Quarles Emblems, of spiritual biography and the typological reading of scripture, as to the secular redefinition of that tradition in the early nineteenth century. Carlyle's Sartor Resartus represents the closest convergence-point of these two sources. In its effort to combine traditional religious language and later Romantic ideas within the doctrine of 'natural supernaturali.