Divine in the Commonplace

Reverent Natural History and the Novel in Britain

Inbunden, Engelska, 2019

Av Amy M. King, New York) King, Amy M. (St John's University

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Realism has long been associated with the secular, but in early nineteenth-century England a realist genre existed that was highly theological: popular natural histories informed by natural theology. The Divine in the Commonplace explores the 'reverent empiricism' of English natural history and how it conceives observation and description as a kind of devotion or act of reverence. Focusing on the texts of popular natural historians, especially seashore naturalists, Amy M. King puts these in conversation with English provincial realist novelists including Austen, Gaskell, Eliot, and Trollope. She argues that the English provincial novel has a 'reverent form' as a result of its connection to the practices and representational strategies of natural history writing in this period, which was literary, empirical, and reverent. This book will appeal to students and scholars of nineteenth-century literature, science historians, and those interested in interdisciplinary connections between pre-Darwinian natural history, religion, and literature.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2019-07-18
Mått158 x 235 x 22 mm
Vikt600 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieCambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Antal sidor316
FörlagCambridge University Press
ISBN9781108492959

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Introduction: natural history, the theology of nature, and the novel; 1. Reverent natural history, the sketch, and the novel: modes of English realism in White, Mitford, and Austen; 2. Early Victorian natural history: reverent empiricism and the aesthetic of the commonplace; 3. The formal realism of reverent natural history: tidepools, aquaria and the seashore natural histories of P. H. Gosse and G. H. Lewes; 4. Reverence at the seashore: seashore natural history, Charles Kingsley's Two Years Ago (1855), and Margaret Gatty's Parables from Nature (1857); 5. Seeing the divine in the commonplace: George Eliot's paranaturalist realism, 1856–1859; 6. Elizabeth Gaskell's everyday: Reverent form and natural theology in Sylvia's Lovers (1863) and Wives and Daughters (1866); Epilogue: Barsetshire via Selborne: Anthony Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867).

'In this elegantly written study of the relationship between nineteenth-century natural history, natural theology, and the English novel, King has shown how all three are designed to celebrate the commonplace. Rather than reading this as a sign of the advance of a secular empiricism, King brilliantly explores how the focus on the ordinary, the hallmark of English provincial realism à la Austen, Gaskell, Kingsley, Trollope, and Eliot, is actually indebted to the reverent form of natural history.' Bernard Lightman, York University