The Divine in the Commonplace
eBook - PDF

The Divine in the Commonplace

Reverent Natural History and the Novel in Britain

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

The Divine in the Commonplace

Reverent Natural History and the Novel in Britain

About this book

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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Yes, you can access The Divine in the Commonplace by Amy M. King in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & English Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half-title page
  3. Series page
  4. Title page
  5. Copyright page
  6. Dedication
  7. Contents
  8. List of Figures
  9. Acknowledgments
  10. Introduction Natural History, the Theology of Nature, and the Novel
  11. Chapter 1 Reverent Natural History, the Sketch, and the Novel: Modes of English Realism in White, Mitford, and Austen
  12. Chapter 2 Early Victorian Natural History: Reverent Empiricism and the Aesthetic of the Commonplace
  13. Chapter 3 The Formal Realism of Reverent Natural History: Tide-pools, Aquaria, and the Seashore Natural Histories of P. H. Gosse and G. H. Lewes
  14. Chapter 4 Reverence at the Seashore: Seashore Natural History, Charles Kingsley’s Two Years Ago (1857), and Margaret Gatty’s Parables from Nature (1855)
  15. Chapter 5 Seeing the Divine in the Commonplace: George Eliot's Paranaturalist Realism (1856–1859)
  16. Chapter 6 Elizabeth Gaskell's Everyday: Reverent Form and Natural Theology in Sylvia's Lovers (1863) and Wives and Daughters (1866)
  17. Epilogue Barsetshire via Selborne: Anthony Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867)
  18. Notes
  19. Bibliography
  20. Index