An ambitious weave of ideological, literary, and commodity history, The Reenchantment of Nineteenth-Century Fiction shows how Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot sacralized Victorian modernity in two contradictory ways: by incarnating their moment as one of transcendent development, and by reenacting bloody rituals from a fading Protestant past. Both the magnitude and the brevity of their success make these works exemplary for our own era, caught between the archaic gods of traditional religion and the still-mysterious ones of market society.

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DAVID PAYNE received his PhD in 1998 from Columbia University, where he held a Whiting and other fellowships. He has taught at Columbia, Auburn and Georgia State universities

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List of Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations Introduction The Cockney and the Prostitute: Dickens, Pickwick Papers , and Oliver Twist The Pathos of Distance: Thackeray, Serialization, and Vanity Fair Dickens Breaks Out: The Public Readings and Little Dorrit A Dance of Indecision: George Eliot's Shorter Fiction The Production of Belief: The Serial, Middlemarch Epilogue: The Sacred Monster: The Serial Novelists' Reenchantments Notes Bibliography Index