Abstract

While many nineteenth-century readers lauded John Keble’s bestselling The Christian Year (1827) for its soothing properties, its Victorian print afterlife suggests how devotion was being redefined as the century went on: as a set of reading practices premised upon distraction and divided time. Indeed, as a scene from George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893) illustrates, the chronotopes of Keble’s liturgical time and of modernity’s industrial time, while distinct, were coming to resemble one another for many readers of weekly and daily devotional books. In Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885), one of Keble’s most innovative interpolators, Christina Rossetti, embraces this apparent synchronization, playfully revealing how eternal time is produced through a material relation with the devotional book as diurnal reading object.

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