Believing 18th-Century Fiction: Reading Novelism and Theology in Thomas Amory's The Life of John Buncle, ESQ (1756)
Believing 18th-Century Fiction: Reading Novelism and Theology in Thomas Amory's The Life of John Buncle, ESQ (1756)
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相信 18 世纪小说：阅读托马斯·艾默里 (Thomas Amory) 的《约翰·邦克尔 (John Buncle) 的一生》中的小说主义和神学，ESQ (1756)
DOI：
10.1093/litthe/fry021
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发表时间：
2018
影响因子：
0.1
通讯作者：
Haslett M
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Haslett M
18世纪对宗教和小说的批判性研究往往集中在主要小说家与当代自然神论或自由主义潮流之间的关系上，或者集中在小说如何与小册子和布道相抗衡，成为道德和美德问题的试验场上。本文认为，新兴小说的真理主张也可以从神学争议的角度来解读，这一论点是由托马斯阿莫里的小说《约翰·本克的一生》（1756年）中这些问题的明确联系所引发的。当代人对这部小说的反应是把它看作是对强烈反对三位一体的主人公的喜剧讽刺，但他们这样做是因为评论家们在嘲笑，而不是和他在一起。阿莫里，在代表一个热心，甚至“热情”一神论，探讨了一个字符谁是滑稽认真，教条主义在他的宗教宽容，并在他的神学理性主义辩护热情。但是，在写一种小说的时候，阿莫里可以利用一种体裁，这种体裁允许人们想象那些看起来不可能但却可以声称是真实的东西，从而在知识和信仰之间，在理性和启示之间进行调解。
Critical studies of religion and fiction in the eighteenth century have tended to centre either on the relationship between the major novelists and the contemporary currents of deism or latitudinarianism, or on the ways in which the novel came to rival the pamphlet and the sermon as a testing-ground for questions of morality and virtue. This article argues that the truth claims of the emerging novel might also be read in terms of theological controversy, an argument which is prompted by the explicit linking of these issues in Thomas Amory's novel,The Life of John Buncle, Esq(1756). Contemporary responses to the novel read it as a comic satire on its fervently anti-trinitarian protagonist, but they did so because the reviewers were laughingat, rather thanwith, Buncle. Amory, in representing a zealous, even ‘enthusiastic’ Unitarian, explored a character who was comically earnest, dogmatic in his religious toleration, and passionate in his defence of theological rationalism. But in writing a form of fiction, Amory could exploit a genre which permitted an imagining of that which might appear improbable but which can nevertheless claim to be true, and thus mediate between knowledge and faith, between reason and revelation.