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基本説明
Revealing how scientific concerns were literary concerns in the Romantic period, the contributors uncover the vital role that new discoveries in earth, plant, and animal sciences played in the period's literary culture.
Full Description
Uncovers the vital role that new scientific discoveries played in Romantic literary culture.
Although "romantic science" may sound like a paradox, much of the romance surrounding modern science-the mad scientist, the intuitive genius, the utopian transformation of nature-originated in the Romantic period. Romantic Science traces the literary and cultural politics surrounding the formation of the modern scientific disciplines emerging from eighteenth-century natural history. Revealing how scientific concerns were literary concerns in the Romantic period, the contributors uncover the vital role that new discoveries in earth, plant, and animal sciences played in the period's literary culture. As Thomas Pennant put it in 1772, "Natural History is, at present, the favourite science over all Europe, and the progress which has been made in it will distinguish and characterise the eighteenth century in the annals of literature." As they examine the social and literary ramifications of a particular branch or object of natural history, the contributors to this volume historicize our present intellectual landscape by reimagining and redrawing the disciplinary boundaries between literature and science.
Contributors include Alan Bewell, Rachel Crawford, Noah Heringman, Theresa M. Kelley, Amy Mae King, Lydia H. Liu, Anne K. Mellor, Stuart Peterfreund, and Catherine E. Ross.
Contents
List of Figures
A Note About the Cover
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Commerce of Literature and Natural History
Noah Heringman
Part I: The Boundaries of Natural History
1. "Twin Labourers and Heirs of the Same Hopes": The Professional Rivalry of Humphry Davy and William Wordsworth
Catherine E. Ross
2. The Rock Record and Romantic Narratives of the Earth
Noah Heringman
3. "Great Frosts and... Some Very Hot Summers": Strange Weather, the Last Letters, and the Last Days in Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selborne
Stuart Peterfreund
Part II: The Global Reach of Natural History
4. Jefferson's Thermometer: Colonial Biogeographical Constructions of the Climate of America
Alan Bewell
5. Robinson Crusoe's Earthenware Pot: Science, Aesthetics, and the Metaphysics of True Porcelain
Lydia H. Liu
6. Frankenstein, Racial Science, and the "Yellow Peril"
Anne K. Mellor
Part III: Botany, Taxonomy, and Political Discourse
7. Lyrical Strategies, Didactic Intent: Reading the Kitchen Garden Manual
Rachel Crawford
8. Romantic Exemplarity: Botany and "Material" Culture
Theresa M. Kelley
9. Taxonomical Cures: The Politics of Natural History and Herbalist Medicine in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton
Amy Mae King
About the Contributors
Index