The novel has long been considered a literary form existing apart from religion, even if religion as social and moral fact may enter into the lives of its characters from time to time. The belief that the novel, our term for a lengthy work of fiction in prose, is solely the product of the period currently (if unhappily) labeled "Early Modern" has helped to sustain the belief that the novel is a triumphantly modern and secular form of literature. We dwell on authorship and prose style, but ignore earlier problematic points of development, including the eventual advent of the author as an individual "maker" instead of inspired recipient of divine information (see Finkelberg, 1998); in modern literature departments we rarely pause to inquire into the rise of prose itself as a significant and perhaps intrinsically democratic medium (see Goldhill, 2002).

The History of the Novel and Its Historians