Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge

by Tim Fulford , Debbie Lee , Peter J. Kitson

• ISBN13: 9780521039956
• ISBN10: 0521039959
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-07-23
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In 1768, Captain James Cook made the most important scientific voyage of the eighteenth century. He was not alone: scores of explorers like Cook, travelling in the name of science, brought new worlds and new peoples within the horizon of European knowledge for the first time. Their discoveries changed the course of science. Old scientific disciplines, such as astronomy and botany, were transformed; new ones, like craniology and comparative anatomy, were brought into being. Scientific disciplines, in turn, pushed literature of the period towards new subjects, forms and styles. Works as diverse as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Wordsworth's Excursion responded to the explorers' and scientists' latest discoveries. This wide-ranging and well-illustrated study shows how literary Romanticism arose partly in response to science's appropriation of explorers' encounters with foreign people and places and how it, in turn, changed the profile of science and exploration.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations

Acknowledgements

A note on the text

Frequently cited texts

Introduction: bodies of knowledge

Exploration, Science and Literature

Sir Joseph Banks and his networks

Tahiti in London

London in Tahiti: tools of power

Indian flowers and Romantic Orientalism

Mental travellers: Banks, African exploration and the Romantic imagination

Banks, Bligh and the breadfruit: slave plantations, tropical islands and the rhetoric of Romanticism

Exploration, headhunting and race theory: the skull beneath the skin

Theories of terrestrial magnetism and the search for the poles

British Science and Literature in the Context of Empire

'Man electrified man': Romantic revolution and the legacy of Benjamin Franklin

The beast within: vaccination, Romanticism and the Jenneration of disease

Britain's little black boys and the technologies of benevolence

Conclusion

Notes

Index

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