Amy M. King

Divine in the Commonplace (eBook, ePUB)

Reverent Natural History and the Novel in Britain

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Cambridge University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 18. Juli 2019
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781108660617
• Artikelnr.: 62742681

Autorenporträt

Amy M. King is Associate Professor of English at St John's University, New York. She is the author of Bloom: The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel (2003)

Inhaltsangabe

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).