Monthly Archives: June 2011
Additional Topics in Romantic Natural History
Amphibious Thinking The Anxiety of Species: Toward a Romantic Natural History Defining “Life”and “Death” Global Exploration and New Forms of Nature Erasmus Darwin and the Frankenstein Mistake Extinction as Metaphor The Frog-Fish of Surinam Geologist-Poets and Poet-Geologists Human “Monsters” and … Continue reading
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Tagged animals, literature, natural history, plants, science
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The Loves of Plants and Animals: Romantic Science and the Pleasures of Nature
[first published in “Romanticism and Ecology,” Romantic Circles Praxis Series (November 2001) [O]ur intellectual sympathies [rest] with . . . the miseries, or with the joys, of our fellow creatures. – Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia (1794) When Wordsworth notes his faith … Continue reading
The Anxiety of Species: Toward a Romantic Natural History
[first published in The Wordsworth Circle 28:3 (1997): 130-36] We sometimes think that the concept of mutable species burst on the world like a thunderclap with the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. So great was Darwin’s own … Continue reading
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Tagged Blake, Charles Darwin, ecology, Erasmus Darwin, natural history, poetry, Romanticism, Shelley
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Backgrounds: From Aristotle to Erasmus Darwin
For the ancients, mythology suggested powerful interconnections among the natural, the human, and the imaginary. Gods were like humans, humans were like animals, animals were like plants, plants were like humans, and vice versa. Spontaneous generation, parthenogenesis by fire, impregnation … Continue reading
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Tagged Aristotle, astronomy, Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin, myth, poetry, science
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Why a “Romantic” Natural History?
“Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things, Birth and the Grave, that are not as they were” (Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Alastor”, 1816: ll. 719-20) We often assume that Charles Darwin announced a new era in the scientific understanding of … Continue reading
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Tagged literature, natural history, poets, prose, Romanticism, science
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Carolus Linnaeus
Carolus Linnaeus is the Latinized form of Carl von Linne, the Swedish botanist whose systems of classification and nomenclature had a revolutionary effect on the study of all living things. He originally intended to become a doctor, but gradually shifted his … Continue reading
George-Louis Buffon (1707-88)
Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon was the French naturalist perhaps most responsuble for the rise of European interest in natural history during the eighteenth century. His massive Histoire naturelle (36 volumes) set out to organize all that was then … Continue reading
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Gilbert White
Without Gilbert White, natural history would not have developed as it has over the past two centuries. The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne became the first widely distributed, and most widely read, work in English on the subject. Educated … Continue reading
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Oliver Goldsmith
Oliver Goldsmith’s An History of the Earth and Animated Nature has been described as everything from “hackwork” to his “most substantial literary legacy” (Wardle, 1957). The first edition (in eight volumes) appeared in London in 1774. The work sought to … Continue reading
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Erasmus Darwin
Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin, was born near Nottingham on December 12, 1731. He was educated at Cambridge and Edinburgh and settled first near Lichfield and later at Derby. A remarkable polymath, he became a best selling poet during … Continue reading
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Tagged Erasmus Darwin, evolution, Frankenstein, plants, poetry, science, sexuality
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