Overview

Within key texts of Romanticic-era aesthetics, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, and other writers and theorists pointed to the poet, naturalist, and physician Erasmus Darwin as exemplifying a lack of originality and sensibility in the period’s scientific literature--the very qualities that such literature had actually sought to achieve. The success of this strawman tactic in establishing Romantic-era principles resulted in the historical devaluation of numerous other, especially female, imaginative authors, creating misunderstandings about the aesthetic intentions of the period’s scientific literature that continue to hinder and mislead scholars even today. Regenerating Romanticism demonstrates that such strategies enabled some literary critics and arbiters of Romantic-era aesthetics to portray literature and science as locked in competition with one another while also establishing standards for the literary canon that mirrored developing ideas of scientific or biological sexism and racism. With this groundbreaking study, Melissa Bailes renovates understandings of sensibility and its importance to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century movement of scientific literature within genres such as poetry, novels, travel writing, children’s literature that obviously and technically engage with the natural sciences.

Full Product Details

Author:   Melissa Bailes
Publisher:   University of Virginia Press
Imprint:   University of Virginia Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.20cm , Height: 1.90cm , Length: 22.80cm
Weight:   0.265kg
ISBN:  

9780813949406

ISBN 10:   0813949408
Pages:   282
Publication Date:   27 April 2023
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Table of Contents

"Acknowledgments Introduction: Revealing the Strawman; or, the Historical Hoodwinking of Romanticism 1. Botany's Seasonal Disorder: Thomson's Progressive Time, Conjectural Histories, and the Backwardness of Spring 2. Linnaeus's Botanical Clocks: Chronobiological Mechanisms in the Scientific Poetry of Erasmus Darwin, Charlotte Smith, and Felicia Hemans 3. Transformations of Gender, Race, and Poetic Sensibility: Maria Riddell's Transatlantic Botany and Biopolitics 4. Cultivated for Consumption: Botany, Colonial Cannibalism, and National/Natural History in Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl 5. ""On the green margin"": Place, Sensibility, and Originality in Charlotte Smith's ""Flora"" 6. Botany and Madness: Anna Seward, Sensibility, and the Floral Insanities of Darwin, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Clare Conclusion: De Quincey, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, and the Critical Fate of Romanticism and Scientific Literature Notes Bibliography"

Reviews

Regenerating Romanticism makes an important contribution to the ongoing work of expanding and reconsidering our understanding of Romantic-era literary history - and the establishment of what might be called a counter-canon - by detailing canonical male writers' successful efforts to recode sensibility so as to exclude women from literary recognition. --Elizabeth A. Bohls, University of Oregon, Author of Slavery and the Politics of Place: The Colonial Caribbean, 1770-1833

Author Information

Melissa Bailes is Associate Professor of English at Tulane University and the author of Questioning Nature: British Women's Scientific Writing and Literary Originality, 1750-1830 (Virginia).

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