Introduction: Belief and Disbelief After Secularization

Abstract Readers have always been fascinated by the tension between belief and disbelief in the working of fiction. Until recently, however, critics have tended to agree that the questions it raises took on particular urgency in the eighteenth century with the development of the novel form—a form whose length and power to absorb the reader raise the stakes around what we think we're doing when we read them. The essays in this issue suggest that in the wake of the postsecular critique of the secularization thesis, we need to consider diversifying the way we think about belief both within and beyond novel reading.