posted on 2023-06-08, 11:39authored byNorman Vance
Religious fiction flourished throughout the period and beyond it, varied considerably in literary quality, and took many forms. There were novels of personal religious experience, novels of social life in which institutional religion contributed to the drama or the comedy of manners, novels engaging in specific kinds of religious controversy, and novels of religious doubt. In good novels and in bad these categories constantly overlapped, and interacted freely with or passed over into other more secular forms of fiction.