| The Divine in the Commonplace: Reverent Natural History and the Novel in Britain Contributor(s): King, Amy M. (Author) |
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ISBN: 1108492959 ISBN-13: 9781108492959 Publisher: Cambridge University Press OUR PRICE: $114.00 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: August 2019 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh |
| Dewey: 823.809 |
| LCCN: 2019008500 |
| Series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Cultu |
| Physical Information: 0.8" H x 7.7" W x 8.7" (1.20 lbs) 316 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - British Isles |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: 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. |
Contributor Bio(s): King, Amy M.: - 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) |
