Romantic Science : The Literary Forms of Natural History

by Heringman, Noah

• ISBN13: 9780791457016
• ISBN10: 079145701X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-06-01
• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr

Summary

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. Furthermore, as they examine the social and literary ramifications of a particular branch or object of natural history, they historicize our present intellectual landscape by reimagining and redrawing the disciplinary boundaries between literature and science.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	vii
A Note About the Cover	xi
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction: The Commerce of Literature and Natural History	1	(22)
Noah Heringman
Part I The Boundaries of Natural History
Chapter 1 "Twin Labourers and Heirs of the Same Hopes": The Professional Rivalry of Humphry Davy and William Wordsworth	23	(30)
Catherine E. Ross
Chapter 2 The Rock Record and Romantic Narratives of the Earth	53	(32)
Noah Heringman
Chapter 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	85	(26)
Stuart Peterfreund
Part II The Global Reach of Natural History
Chapter 4 Jefferson's Thermometer: Colonial Biogeographical Constructions of the Climate of America	111	(28)
Alan Bewell
Chapter 5 Robinson Crusoe's Earthenware Pot: Science, Aesthetics, and the Metaphysics of True Porcelain	139	(34)
Lydia H. Liu
Chapter 6 Frankenstein, Racial Science, and the "Yellow Peril"	173	(26)
Anne K. Mellor
Part III Botany, Taxonomy, and Political Discourse
Chapter 7 Lyrical Strategies, Didactic Intent: Reading the Kitchen Garden Manual	199	(24)
Rachel Crawford
Chapter 8 Romantic Exemplarity: Botany and "Material" Culture	223	(32)
Theresa M. Kelley
Chapter 9 Taxonomical Cures: The Politics of Natural History and Herbalist Medicine in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton	255	(16)
Amy Mae King
About the Contributors	271	(4)
Index	275