Against an earlier tendency to separate out the texts of oracles from the literary works that preserve them, recent scholarship on Herodotus has increasingly focused attention on the very tight way in which oracular responses are integrated into the narrative contexts that surround them. In order better to conceptualize such phenomena, scholars are increasingly employing the category of “oracular tales,” that is, stories in which (normally Delphic) oracles form an integral part of the narrative texture. The present contribution seeks to pursue this line of enquiry further in an attempt at determining what the use of oracular responses in metric form can tell us about the tradition of oral narrative that Herodotus’ Histories are based upon.

Chapter 2 examines how adaptive appearance could problematise Victorian natural theology through the example of the parson-naturalist Charles Kingsley. Kingsley’s faith was bound up with ideals of truth and sincerity, which he imagined as divine values that God’s creation exemplified and symbolised. Adaptive appearance challenged this textual view of nature, suggesting that nature’s aspects served purely to promote organisms’ survival, often through deceit. It is argued that Kingsley sometimes tried to resolve this contradiction by locating truthfulness in the rise of science instead of in raw, animal nature. In texts such as Glaucus: Wonders of the Shore and his evolutionary fairy tale The Water-Babies, he depicts science as a providential realisation of God’s values. However, Kingsley also sought to preserve vestiges of moral symbolism in nature since this notion underlay both his religious faith and the Church’s authority in knowledge of the natural world. Kingsley’s insistence on nature’s symbolism cohered with his insistence on the spirituality of the body, preserving a link between matter and divinity. This rhetorical strategy would be echoed by other religiously committed commentators who sought to reconcile adaptive appearance with the notion of nature as a divine text.

Chapter 4 focuses on Charles Kingsley and Margaret Gatty, two mid-Victorian figures who wrote in multiple genres, including novels, parables, and seashore natural histories. The chapter centers on Kingsley’s novel of English provincial realism Two Years Ago (1857) and Gatty’s Parables of Nature (1855-71), both of which offer a clear discursive bridge between natural history and imaginative fictions at mid-century. Two Years Ago is the lost link between the more canonical provincial realism of Jane Austen’s Emma and those of George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell. The chapter considers the novel alongside Kingsley’s seashore natural history Glaucus: The Wonders of the Shore (1855). The chapter analyzes a section of Gatty’s Parables from Nature (in which a zoophyte, a seaweed, and a bookworm converse) alongside her British Sea-Weeds (1863). These texts explore the thematic and formal connections between reverent natural history and fiction at mid-century.