Chronometres: Devotional Literature, Duration, and Victorian Reading
Chronometres: Devotional Literature, Duration, and Victorian Reading
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Abstract
What does it mean to feel time, to sense its passing along the sinews and nerves of the body as much as the synapses of the mind? And how do books, as material arrangements of print and paper, mediate such temporal experiences? Chronometres: Devotional Literature, Duration, and Victorian Reading is a study of the time-inflected reading practices of religious literature, the single largest market for print in Victorian Britain. It examines poetic cycles by John Keble, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, and Frances Ridley Havergal; family prayer manuals, Sunday-reading books and periodicals; and devotional gift books and daily textbooks. Designed for diurnal and weekly reading, chronometrical literature tuned its readers’ attentions to the idea of Eternity and the everlasting peace of spiritual transcendence, but only in so far as it parcelled out reading into discrete increments that resembled the new industrial time-scales of factories and railway schedules. Chronometres thus takes up print culture, affect theory, and the religious turn in literary studies in order to explore the intersections between devotional practice and the condition of modernity. It argues that what defines Victorian devotional literature is the experience of its time signatures, those structures of feeling associated with its reading durations. For many Victorians, reading devotionally increasingly meant reading in regular portions and often according to the calendar and workday in contrast to the liturgical year. Keeping pace with the temporal measures of modernity, devotion became a routinized practice: a way of synchronizing the interior life of spirit with the exigencies of clock time. This kind of devotional observance coincided with the publication, between 1827 and 1890, of a diverse array of largely Protestant books and print that shared formal and material relationships to temporality. By dispensing devotion as daily or weekly doses of reading, chronometrical literature imagined and arranged time in relation to time’s materiality. But in so doing, it also left open temporal spaces that could be filled by readers, some of whom marked temporality through their own practices like annotation and scrapbooking, which publishers were then quick to emulate. Chronometrical literature likewise produced a host of embodied cognitions that could include moments of absorption but, equally, ones of boredom and mental drift. Such texts therefore did not necessarily discipline Victorian readers according to the demands of the clock or even of religious doctrine. For their regular yet malleable temporal arrangements also meant that readers might discover their own agencies and affects through encounters with print, such that devotional readers themselves came to participate in a reciprocal process of both reading and writing in time. Chronometres considers how the deliverances afforded through time-scaled reading are persistently materialized in the body, both that of the book and of the reader. Recognizing that literature and devotion are not timeless abstractions, it asks how the materiality of books, conceived as horological relationships through reading, might bring about the felt experience of time. Even as Victorian devotion invites us to tarry over the page, it also prompts the question: what if it is “Eternity” that keeps time with the clock?
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