Patterns

I'm recovering from the unusual experience of writing briefly about George Eliot, who is a great novelist and, therefore, not the sort of author I tend to post about on this blog.  She is, however, the sort of author my editors will want to hear about.  Now, that being said, some of my longstanding (long-suffering?) readers were wondering how I stand the strain of contemplating novelists like E. H. Dering, whose prose style always makes me want to consider switching careers to basketball commentator.   So, first of all, one of the scholarly problems involved in the work I do is that there is little sense of canon: just because most Victorian religious fiction has been swept into the dustbin of the "popular" or "non-canonical" does not mean that Victorian religious fiction did not have its own canon.  This canon shifted around, as canons do, but by the 1840s there was already a pretty good sense of who defined the genre (critics usually began the story with Hannah More).  There are some big, fairly sweeping literary-historical accounts of religious fiction per se--Maison, Wolff--but they don't really map out which novelists were exerting more influence on other novelists.  (For example, Maison sort of writes off E. C. Agnew entirely, and Wolff doesn't mention her at all,  but her Geraldine is key to understanding how Catholic fiction develops at mid-century--far more so than Newman's Loss and Gain or Callista.)  Second, then, this means that while I write about individual authors on the blog, in my more formal practice I'm interested in how lots of authors and their works interact and argue.  I'm looking for the conversations; I'm also looking for the outliers.  This is why I've been reading a lot of Dering.  On the one hand, despite how terrible a novelist he is, he's experimenting with genres in ways that characterize a lot of Victorian Catholic fiction; like many of his contemporaries, Dering is interested in how certain narrative/genre expectations are implicitly, if not explicitly, coded Protestant.  On the other hand, Dering is an outlier, because as a novelist, he's one of Newman's very few imitators (more emphasis on process than on doctrine--in fact, Dering's characters often convert before they know anything about Catholic theology at all!).    My wailing and gnashing of teeth is usually reserved for individual authors; putting everything together, by contrast, is hugely enjoyable.  And, more to the point, possibly useful for other people.