This work introduces key debates, movements, and ideas relating to the Christian religion, and connects these to literary developments from 1750-1914. The authors provide close readings of popular texts and use these to explore complex religious ideas.

This book traces specific cases of how evangelical and Methodist discourse practices interacted with major cultural and literary events during the long eighteenth century, from the rise of the novel to the Revolution controversy of the 1790s to the shifting ground for women writers leading up to the Reform era in the 1830s.

The Primitive Methodist Connexion's mature social character may have been working-class, but this did not reflect its social origins.