The Divine in the Commonplace: Reverent Natural History and the Novel in Britain: 117 (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Series Number 117) - Hardcover

'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

'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

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.