Candy Gunther Brown's The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in America, 1789-1880 (U of North Carolina, 2004) raises at least two issues that are worth considering in a British context. One has to do with copyright; the other, with interpretation.
1. Copyright. According to Brown, evangelicals were hesitant to jump on the copyright bandwagon: "Evangelicals, presuming the shared ownership of texts by the Christian community, were relatively slow to follow suit by copyrighting materials. Some evangelicals continued to debate the legitimacy of copyright through the end of the century" (179). Brown's argument certainly adds a new twist to the omnipresence of pirated British religious novels in Victorian America. If she is correct, at least some religious publishers would not have interpreted their actions as theft (despite the objections of understandably grouchy novelists on the UK side of the pond); evangelical novels, by virtue of their content, wanted to be "free." Or, if not literally free, then freely moving. As Brown also notes, this attitude to copyright also meant that editors had no qualms about altering texts for doctrinal or other reasons--much to the irritation of twenty-first century critics who need to work with them. (My edition of Pierre and His Family; Or, A Story of the Waldenses notes that it has been "revised by the committee of publication," but the revisions are entirely silent.) Again, if texts are always "open," as it were, to revision by later writers, then authorship becomes something of a community project; Brown shows, for example, how Augustus Toplady's "Rock of Ages" mutated into something virtually opposite to what was originally intended (213-15).
It would be interesting to know if British evangelicals (and non-evangelicals, for that matter) similarly saw their work as owned by the community rather than themselves. A number of things need untangling here--to begin with, plagiarism runs rather rampant in Victorian popular didactic literature, and it's hard to tell where theology begins and financial exigency ends. (I once had a bizarre moment of deja vu while reading a biography collection, and eventually realized that the author had simply stolen an entire chapter from someone else's book.) But, as Aileen Fyfe has shown, UK publishers like the Religious Tract Society were just as anxious about appearing "commercial" as were their US counterparts. Such an "are we or aren't we?" attitude could well lead to different approaches to intellectual property. And then again, I haven't really come across much in the way of research on how specifically religious writers in the Victorian period understood copyright or authorship, although there's certainly plenty of work on authorship per se. According to Beatrice Marshall, for example, her mother Emma "lightheartedly" began her first novel "with no portentously serious ambition or determination to succeed"; later, we are told that "[n]ever did a mother who was a writer of books make less fuss about the business of writing them." And yet, Mrs. Marshall was certainly capable of grumping that she ought to be making as much money as Anthony Trollope--especially in the American market [1]. I think there's a danger of overemphasizing the charity and underestimating the business angle.
2. Interpretation. Brown argues that evangelical writers developed what she calls a "'functionalist' view of sacred language": "The distinction between sacred and profane language came to rest less on the kinds of words adopted than on their usefulness in interfacing the Word with human experience" (4). This position stands in direct opposition to "art for art's sake," since it measures a text's effectiveness in terms of its positive spiritual influence. As Brown notes, such functionalism enabled writers to appropriate any genre that came their way, including that dangerous genre known as the novel. Brown goes on to argue, moreover, that evangelical attitudes to language impede twenty-first century attempts to, say, apply poststructuralist theories to nineteenth-century texts: "Care must be taken in taken in applying a term from literary studies to evangelical print culture since evangelicals distinguished sacred words from profane literature...Usefulness in this pursuit ["pilgrimage"], rather than formal qualities, constituted the essential mark of membership in the evangelical canon" (80).
Brown's argument about functionalism certainly holds up in the British religious literary scene; like their American counterparts, British novelists model reading practices, manage interpretation, call readers to action, and so forth. In addition, I agree that any literary theory that requires hyper-close readings to work--e.g., deconstruction--will go down in flames when faced with these texts, many of which don't display the kind of verbal or narrative sophistication that deconstructive readings frequently take as a given. Nevertheless, I couldn't help thinking (for once!) that more of some kinds of theory would actually have been a boon to Brown's argument, which is at its weakest when it comes to interpretation; narratology, for example, does help clarify what a number of these novelists are about (see, e.g., Robyn Warhol). And genre theory frequently comes in handy, especially when thinking about how writers mix-and-match genres and modes within the same text.
[1] Beatrice Marshall, Emma Marshall: A Biographical Sketch (London: Seeley and Co., Limited, 1901), 72, 98, 190.
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