My project takes seriously the common, but frequently overlooked charge that the English novel is parochial—that, in Virginia Woolf’s words, “all those good novels” are “without more experience of life than could enter the house of a respectable clergyman.” Restoring “parochialism” to its root sense, I show why the parish itself—a Christian community over which a parson presided for life—became the novel’s primary topos in the nineteenth century and provided its model of temporal experience. Reading the nineteenth century as a moment when the parish disappeared as Britain’s longstanding center of social, political and religious life, I ask why the secularization of national life nonetheless spurred so many novelists to widely embrace the parish’s modes of representation, devotion and authority. Situating the novel within a dense archive of parish gazettes, sermons, tracts and workhouse records, I chart the novel’s response to the retreat of Anglican pastoral authority not as an attempt to restore it but rather to provide the grounds for faith’s active exercise in the face of spiritual and interpretive uncertainty. My project shows how authors reconfigured reading as a form of pastoral work—a close, laborious, yet seemingly unproductive attention to everyday life—that suffused earthly life with latent meaning, and rendered such meaning a function of parochial residence: neither immediately legible through outward reference nor as the extrinsic dispensation of providence, but rather as willfully, if uncertainly, generated by dwelling within the bounds of the text.

I explore how religious institutional practices reorient Victorian reading by highlighting the nineteenth century as a moment when narrative becomes structured by pastoral residence—the ongoing presence of the parson in the novel and the parish. At the center of my project is the recovery of the plot of parish tenure, which begins with the clergyman’s arrival in a small country parish and ends with his leave-taking or death. My chapters trace how this plot originates in the genre of the parish novel and reverberates throughout the works of George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, John Henry Newman, Margaret Oliphant, Mrs Humphry Ward, and college novelists. These writers turned the parson’s labor of sustained attention into forms of duration and narrative time. I unearth the surprisingly static figures of pastoral life that come to organize reading: liturgical observance, by which time passes but does not progress; the ritual of “beating the parish bounds,” a cyclical walk that reinforces one’s residence; the modest labor of a “living.” Whereas the parson poses a curiously unnarratable figure in earlier novels such as The Vicar of Wakefield and Mansfield Park, mid-century novelists take up tenure as a narrative function, troubling modernity’s overtly teleological energies by converting the fugitive meaning of plot into the felt experience of form. “Life was not a task,” writes George Eliot in Adam Bede, “but a sinecure.” Far from an aesthetic shortcoming, the novel’s parochialism signaled literature’s new invitation to “dwell.” However, pastoral work’s peculiarly unproductive quality also rendered it an inelegant fit in our literary history. So finally, I show how Victorian writers simultaneously drew on pastoral experience and provided the terms for its narrative disqualification. By century’s end, “parochialism” emerged as a small-minded, but pervasive, cultural sensibility through the novel’s contradictory acknowledgment of the parish’s obsolescence and an abiding attachment to it. My project at once offers a history of the ecclesiastical and religious practices that have come to inform our reading and rethinks secularization not as religion’s retreat from the world so much as its reorientation within reading itself.

Occasions: Poetry with Prose, 1836-1877 begins in an observation: that the reader of texts from this period is always encountering verse when it is least looked for. Misquoted in newspapers, tucked into the busy media environments of the emergent monthlies, deployed in friendship albums, journals, and sentimental novels, and woven into the tissue of the genre we now call literary prose, verse fragments are called on to perform a range of literary and social tasks that are easy for contemporary readings to miss. Though poetry of the period may reach toward the aesthetic independence now associated with “lyricization”, alongside such ambitions Occasions recovers a genre that invites, as often, its own decomposition and requotation. Much of the difficulty lies in how Ralph Waldo Emerson has been read. When foundational, but complex, manifestoes such as “The Poet” are read towards an “ideal” or “imperial” poet, the Transcendentalists’ perennially neglected verse may appear slight or stiff in comparison. But Emerson’s essay dwells also at length in the possibilities of minor verse, granted it be close at hand, just as he advocates in another essay for an “adventitious” poetics of “happy hits”, arguing verse gives “greater delight … in happy quotation than in the poem” (72). It is all these other, less mystified moments of American poetics—intermittent, immanently social, and prone to disappearance—that Occasions traces, among the Transcendentalists, and outward in nineteenth-century social and political life. In the aftermath of the Romantic revolution, “occasional verse” is a cloudy pejorative; Hegel dismisses such pieces as slight, even while recognizing the category may include most lyrics of distinction. To recover a firmer lexicon for Emerson’s “moments” and Henry David Thoreau’s “occasions” of poetry, I return to the rhetorical, commemorative, and oratorical cultures of the early nineteenth century, and to the vivid tradition of Revolutionary and early Republican topical satires derived from them. The influence of these throughlines on Emerson and Thoreau locates the occasion and the verse it produces, as the key to a poetic historiography of crisis and response in which the individual speaker is called toward his moment and audience. With this move, Occasions participates in the gradual erosion of what Rei Terada calls “the autonomy of the lyric object”—and, I contend, the lyric subject—that has anchored much twentieth-century literary theory. Indeed, in Thoreau’s radical appropriations of other’s poetic property, and in the extremes of anonymity he uses verse to create and court, I locate a transhistorical commons and a resistance to the cordon of single authorship. This anonymity, and this ability to make the past present, and vice versa, help clarify the explicitly social affordances that Emerson and Thoreau use verse to propose. One assertion of my readings of Emerson is that “The Poet,” as articulated in the 1844 essay of that name and elsewhere, is shadowed by another model figure of a poet significantly crosshatched by values such as wit, utility, conversation, lightness, and disappearance. Drawing on significant archival research, I suggest the close source of this figure is “Ellery” Channing. Though now a footnote, Channing was in many respects the most prominent exemplum of transcendental poetry in the 1840s; when Emerson withdrew his support of Thoreau’s verse, it was to transfer that endorsement and affection to Channing. I argue that Channing’s poetry and company remain important precisely because of the lightness, the responsiveness to social contexts, and the intermittence that Emerson finds in them. From this angle, the collaborative projects Channing assembles—the unpublished “Country Walks” (compiled from his, Emerson’s, and Thoreau’s journals), and his 1873 biography, Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist—are striking for the way they figure the analysis of verse (in the former case) and occasional modes such as elegy (in the latter), as the both the materials and the mode of sociality and life narration. Occasions turns last to Thoreau’s inheritance of Emerson’s poetics. Thoreau is initially motivated by the imperial powers of the poet, and his sacralizing function with respect to American geography, as is seen in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849); however, the sheer proliferation of verse and verse analysis in that text, which overwhelms its putative physical context, exposes the latent tension in Emerson’s system between the visions of the poet as a translator, and as a reorderer of nature. Walden (1854) marks Thoreau’s elaboration of the occasion into an epistemological principle that derives from, and involves poetry, while transcending verse form. I follow finally Walden’s sustained poetomachy with Channing, whose poetry Thoreau frequently and dramatically quotes; the central term of the debate is the cultural value to be accorded to the Poet. I argue that the peak of this debate, in the problem chapter “Baker Farm,” marks Walden’s rejection of ownership of land as of language, and its turn to a poetics of the commons, influentially modeling poems as malleable sites of linguistic reception and barter responsive to specific historical and local needs.

This dissertation traces the history and theory of creativity from its theological origins to its modern apotheosis as a defining trait of human being and flourishing. Reclaimed from early modern creation theology, creativity was recast as an immanent mode of making dependent upon environmental context and historical circumstance. It became a natural capacity of humans reconceived as not just (or no longer) God’s “creatures” but creators in their own right—even creatures of their own making. The creature (literally “a product of creative action”) was turned into a model of artful making through empowering reciprocity. Insisting that the cultivation of creativity depended on recognizing humanity’s creaturely condition—its temporal and earthly finitude, material and social interdependence, and affinity with other living forms—writers from Mary Shelley to W. E. B. Du Bois recast the human as a “creature of” formative process and context: a creature of art. In so doing, they remind us that the creature is the missing protagonist in the history of creativity as a form of human making. The nineteenth-century conception of creativity moved away from ideals of autonomy and originality. Against the transcendence and timelessness attached to Romantic notions of creative genius, a creaturely creativity was grounded in the period’s fascination with the nitty-gritty of technology, the minutiae of technical know-how, and practical arts—simply, with making. I argue that the nineteenth century found in the creature a way of thinking about humans as products not of god’s eternal law but of the earthly laws of creativity: the operative conditions of creation that obtain in our lived environments. The effort to understand these laws left thinkers in the nineteenth century with a new conception of creativity as a mode of artful making enabled by the contexts and circumstances that make us who we are. Recovering this effort prompts us helps us see that our current fascination with making is part of a deeper and richer history than has been supposed.