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Questioning Nature
In the mid-eighteenth century, many British authors and literary critics anxiously claimed that poetry was in crisis. These writers complained that modern poets plagiarized classical authors as well as one another, asserted that no new subjects for verse remained, and feared poetry's complete exhaustion. Questioning Nature explores how major women writers of the era—including Mary Shelley, Anna Barbauld, and Charlotte Smith—turned in response to developing disciplines of natural history such as botany, zoology, and geology. Recognizing the sociological implications of inquiries in the natural sciences, these authors renovated notions of originality through natural history while engaging ...
Regenerating Romanticism
Within key texts of Romantic-era aesthetics, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, and other writers and theorists pointed to the poet, naturalist, and physician Erasmus Darwin as exemplifying a lack of originality and sensibility in the period’s scientific literature--the very qualities that such literature had actually sought to achieve. The success of this strawman tactic in establishing Romantic-era principles resulted in the historical devaluation of numerous other, especially female, imaginative authors, creating misunderstandings about the aesthetic intentions of the period’s scientific literature that continue to hinder and mislead scholars even today. Regenerating Romanticism dem...
Placing Charlotte Smith
A lively and far-ranging interest in place, space, and situation characterizes the work of Romantic-era British author Charlotte Smith (1749-1806). Featuring ten original essays, an introduction and an epilogue, this volume offers new insights into Smith’s life and work by exploring two central issues: Smith’s place as a foundational writer in her period, and her contribution to the creation of “place” as a concept of social and literary importance. The contributors analyze themes such as itineracy, the natural world, and patriotism; they also explore the position of Smith’s work and authorial identity in terms of genre, aesthetics, and market dynamics. With its innovative approach to place as a material location, symbolic principle, and literary device, this volume advances our understanding of Smith’s work. Placing Charlotte Smith reveals Smith as an author who not only energizes our interest in domestic concerns, but who also shapes a global discourse constituted by changing ideas about borders, travel, national, and international identities.
Extinction and Memorial Culture
This book considers how we encounter and make meaning from extinction in diverse settings and cultures. It brings together an international and interdisciplinary range of scholars to consider how extinction is memorialised in museums and cultural institutions, through monuments, in literature and art, through public acts of ritual and protest, and in everyday practices. In an era in which species are becoming extinct at an unprecedented rate, we must find new ways to engage critically, creatively, and courageously with species loss. Extinction and Memorial Culture: Reckoning with Species Loss in the Anthropocene develops the conceptual tools to think in complex ways about extinctions and their aftermath, along with providing new insights into commemorating and mourning more-than-human lives. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the environmental humanities, extinction studies, memorial culture, and the Anthropocene.
Late Romanticism and the End of Politics
In the late Romantic age, demands for political change converged with thinking about the end of the world. This book examines writings by Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and their circle that imagined the end, from poems by Byron that pictured fallen empires, sinking islands, and dying stars to the making and unmaking of populations in Frankenstein and The Last Man. These works intersected with and enclosed reflections upon brewing political changes. By imagining political dynasties, slavery, parliament, and English law reaching an end, writers challenged liberal visions of the political future that viewed the basis of governance as permanently settled. The prospect of volcanic eruptions and biblical deluges, meanwhile, pointed towards new political worlds, forged in the ruins of this one. These visions of coming to an end acquire added resonance in our own time, as political and planetary end-times converge once again.
Milieus of Minutiae
The long history of tiny matter(s) in the sciences, thought, and culture From catastrophic weather and steady warming caused by the accumulation of carbon particles in the Earth’s atmosphere to societies brought to a standstill by microscopic viruses, the new millennium has reminded us of how the minutest of phenomena can have outsized effects. This notion is one that has preoccupied the European and Anglo-American cultural imaginary since at least early modernity. Milieus of Minutiae brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to investigate various forms and appearances of minutiae prior to and beyond the advent of magnification. The collection illuminates connections between ...
Birds in Eighteenth-Century Literature
This book examines literary representations of birds from across the world in anage of expanding European colonialism. It offers important new perspectives intothe ways birds populate and generate cultural meaning in a variety of literary andnon-literary genres from 1700–1840 as well as throughout a broad range ofecosystems and bioregions. It considers a wide range of authors, including someof the most celebrated figures in eighteenth-century literature such as John Gay,Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Cowper, MaryWollstonecraft, Thomas Bewick, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, andGilbert White. ignwogwog[p
Sensitive Witnesses
Kristin M. Girten tells a new story of feminist knowledge-making in the Enlightenment era by exploring the British female philosophers who asserted their authority through the celebration of profoundly embodied observations, experiences, and experiments. This book explores the feminist materialist practice of sensitive witnessing, establishing an alternate history of the emergence of the scientific method in the eighteenth century. Francis Bacon and other male natural philosophers regularly downplayed the embodied nature of their observations. They presented themselves as modest witnesses, detached from their environment and entitled to the domination and exploitation of it. In contrast, the...
Miles of Stare
Miles of Stare explores the problem of nineteenth-century American literary vision: the strange conflation of visible reality and poetic language that emerges repeatedly in the metaphors and literary creations of American transcendentalists. The strangeness of nineteenth-century poetic vision is exemplified most famously by Emerson’s transparent eyeball. That disembodied, omniscient seer is able to shed its body and transcend sight paradoxically in order to see—not to create—poetic language “manifest” on the American landscape. In Miles of Stare, Michelle Kohler explores the question of why, given American transcendentalism’s anti-empiricism, the movement’s central trope become...
Peopling the World
A compelling study of views about population and demographic mobility in the British long eighteenth century In John Milton's Paradise Lost of 1667, Adam and Eve are promised they will produce a "race to fill the world," a thought that consoles them even after the trauma of the fall. By 1798, the idea that the world would one day be entirely filled by people had become, in Thomas Malthus's hands, a nightmarish vision. In Peopling the World, Charlotte Sussman asks how and why this shift took place. How did Britain's understanding of the value of reproduction, the vacancy of the planet, and the necessity of moving people around to fill its empty spaces change? Sussman addresses these questions...
