Romantic Natural History | A survey of relationships between literary works & natural history in the century before Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859)

(Male Narwal, or Unicorn, 1828)

I. Why a “Romantic” Natural History?

II. Backgrounds: From Aristotle to Erasmus Darwin

III. The Anxiety of Species: Toward a Romantic Natural History

IV. Romantic Science and the Pleasures of Nature

V. Additional Topics in Romantic Natural History

VI. A Romantic Natural History Timeline: 1750-1859

VII. Darwin’s Evolution: A New Gallery of Images

VIII. Natural Historians:

(The Temple of Nature, 1803)

Carolus Linnaeus (1707-78), George-Louis Buffon (1707-88),
Gilbert White (1720-93)
Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74), Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802),
Joseph Priestley (1733-1804)
William Bartram (1739-1823), Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826),
William Paley (1743-1805)
Jean Lamarck (1744-1829), Benjamin Rush (1746-1813),
Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859)
Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), William Smith (1769-1839),
Geoffray St. Hilaire (1772-1844)
Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873), John D. Godman (1794-1830)
Louis Agassiz (1807-73)
Charles Darwin (1809-82), Henry David Thoreau (1817-62),
Spencer F. Baird (1823-87)

XIX. Literary Figures:

(“The Fertilization of Egypt,” 1791)

James Thomson (1700-48), John Dyer (1700-58),
Thomas Gray (1716-71)
Christopher Smart (1722-71), Thomas Warton (1728-90),
William Cowper (1731-1800)
Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825), Charlotte Smith (1749-1806),
William Blake (1757-1827)
Robert Burns (1759-96), Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823),
William Wordsworth (1770-1850),
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Lord Byron (1788-1824),
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822),
Felicia Hemans (1793-1835), John Clare (1793-1864)
John Keats (1795-1821),
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851), Letitia Landon (1802-38)
Thomas Beddoes (1803-49),
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92), Robert Browning (1812-89)

X. Artists and Illustrators:

(Nightingale, Bewick, 1797)

Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-92), Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827)
Thomas Bewick (1753-1828),
Rubens Peale (1784-1865), John James Audubon (1785-1851),
Titian Peale (1799-1885)

XI. A Romantic Natural History Bibliography

(8/2011: Updated Regularly)

Houghton Mifflin has published a teaching anthology

based on the Romantic Natural History hypertext

Click cover image to purchase a paperback copy of Romantic Natural Histories (2004)

See also http://blogs.dickinson.edu/romnat/2012/07/02/urbanatural-roosting/ or click cover image:

to order a paperback copy of Beyond Romantic Ecocriticsm: Toward Urbanatural Roosting (2012)

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