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...
View ArticleBackgrounds: From Aristotle to Erasmus Darwin
A ginger-root plant from Barton's "Botany" "For the ancients, a butterfly might be the soul of a deceased person and, more importantly, the soul might be 'like' a butterfly." For the ancients,...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticleThe 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. -...
View ArticleAdditional 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...
View ArticleA Romantic Natural History Timeline: 1750-1859
1750: Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”; Johann Tobias Mayer, Map of the Moon 1751: Linnaeus, Philosophia Botanica 1752: Thomas Chatterton b. (d.1770); Benjamin Franklin invents...
View ArticleDarwin’s Evolution: A New Gallery of Images
Darwin’s Evolution: Image Gallery Introduction: From Aristotle to Erasmus Darwin . . . Pliny the Elder died on Vesuvius (N.I.H.) Darwin’s Fly-trap (Botanic Garden, 1794, author copy) I. The...
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