Victorian Conversion Narratives and Reading Communities

Reading canonical authors such as John Henry Newman, Charles Dickens, Charlotte BrontÃ, George Eliot and Oscar Wilde through a dual lens of literary history and post-liberal theology, Emily Walker Heady suggests that Victorian authors discuss conversion experiences in the context of the modes in which they are narrated. Thus, conversion narratives became a form of literary criticism, while literary conventions functioned as a means of discussing the nature of conversion.