Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History
By:
Sign Up Now!
Already a Member? Log In
You must be logged into UK education collection to access this title.
Learn about membership options,
or view our freely available titles.
- Synopsis
- For many critics, Romanticism is synonymous with nature writing, for representations of the natural world appear during this period with a freshness, concreteness, depth, and intensity that have rarely been equaled. Why did nature matter so much to writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? And how did it play such an important role in their understanding of themselves and the world?In Natures in Translation, Alan Bewell argues that there is no Nature in the singular, only natures that have undergone transformation through time and across space. He examines how writers;¢;‚¬;€?as disparate as Erasmus and Charles Darwin, Joseph Banks, Gilbert White, William Bartram, William Wordsworth, John Clare, and Mary Shelley;¢;‚¬;€?understood a world in which natures were traveling and resettling the globe like never before. Bewell presents British natural history as a translational activity aimed at globalizing local natures by making them mobile, exchangeable, comparable, and representable. Bewell explores how colonial writers, in the period leading up to the formulation of evolutionary theory, responded to a world in which new natures were coming into being while others disappeared. For some of these writers, colonial natural history held the promise of ushering in a "cosmopolitan" nature in which every species, through trade and exchange, might become a true "citizen of the world." Others struggled with the question of how to live after the natures they depended upon were gone. Ultimately, Natures in Translation demonstrates that;¢;‚¬;€?far from being separate from the dominant concerns of British imperial culture;¢;‚¬;€?nature was integrally bound up with the business of empire.
- Copyright:
- 2017
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- Book Size:
- 416 Pages
- ISBN-13:
- 9781421420974
- Related ISBNs:
- 9781421420967
- Publisher:
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Date of Addition:
- 05/11/19
- Copyrighted By:
- N/A
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
- English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
- History, Nonfiction, Science, Literature and Fiction, Language Arts
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
- This is a copyrighted book.
Reviews
Other Books
- by Alan Bewell
- in History
- in Nonfiction
- in Science
- in Literature and Fiction
- in Language Arts