The Divine in the Commonplace: Reverent Natural History and the Novel in Britain

Author:   Amy M. King (St John's University, New York)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
ISBN:  

9781108492959


Pages:   316
Publication Date:   18 July 2019
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Manufactured on demand   Availability explained
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The Divine in the Commonplace: Reverent Natural History and the Novel in Britain


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Author:   Amy M. King (St John's University, New York)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.80cm , Height: 2.20cm , Length: 23.50cm
Weight:   0.600kg
ISBN:  

9781108492959


ISBN 10:   1108492959
Pages:   316
Publication Date:   18 July 2019
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  College/higher education ,  Professional & Vocational ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand   Availability explained
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

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).

Reviews

'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 a la Austen, Gaskell, Kingsley, Trollope, and Eliot, is actually indebted to the reverent form of natural history.' Bernard Lightman, York University `Amy King's The Divine in the Commonplace marks a quiet but major revision in our thinking about Victorian realism. Instead of reading it in relation to secular scientific empiricism, she demonstrates with scholarly authority its greater closeness to natural history writing and its religious understanding of the natural world. Her analysis of its strategies and of novels that emulate it is startlingly new, and her wonderful coinage, 'reverent empiricism', should become a standard descriptive term in criticism of the Victorian novel.' George Levine, Rutgers University, New Jersey


'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 a la Austen, Gaskell, Kingsley, Trollope, and Eliot, is actually indebted to the reverent form of natural history.' Bernard Lightman, York University 'Amy King's The Divine in the Commonplace marks a quiet but major revision in our thinking about Victorian realism. Instead of reading it in relation to secular scientific empiricism, she demonstrates with scholarly authority its greater closeness to natural history writing and its religious understanding of the natural world. Her analysis of its strategies and of novels that emulate it is startlingly new, and her wonderful coinage, 'reverent empiricism', should become a standard descriptive term in criticism of the Victorian novel.' George Levine, Rutgers University, New Jersey '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 a la Austen, Gaskell, Kingsley, Trollope, and Eliot, is actually indebted to the reverent form of natural history.' Bernard Lightman, York University `Amy King's The Divine in the Commonplace marks a quiet but major revision in our thinking about Victorian realism. Instead of reading it in relation to secular scientific empiricism, she demonstrates with scholarly authority its greater closeness to natural history writing and its religious understanding of the natural world. Her analysis of its strategies and of novels that emulate it is startlingly new, and her wonderful coinage, 'reverent empiricism', should become a standard descriptive term in criticism of the Victorian novel.' George Levine, Rutgers University, New Jersey


Author Information

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)

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