Volmer, Stephanie (Author)
My dissertation describes an important change in the accepted understanding and imagination of nature. This change took place over the course of the eighteenth century, when nature, from being conceived of as a settled state subject to cyclical change, came to be seen as mobile and mutable. The sense of a mobile, mutable nature--the dissertation's central trope--arose from the experience of travel and discovery, which was accompanied from the first by a vigorous process of transplantation. Plants and seeds were carried across oceans, having been dug up on one continent to be replanted often in another. From being static and predictable, plant life therefore became, for scholars and poets alike, dynamic, mutable, and adaptable. I focus on the writings of a small group of men in the Anglo-American world, including John and William Bartram, Peter Collinson, Alexander Garden, John Ellis, and Carl Linnaeus, who were engaged in the work of transporting, planting, writing about, and classifying botanical objects. All were men of science (by inclination if not profession) and men of letters, and it is in their actual letters--their epistolary exchanges--that the transformation emerges most clearly. Indeed, letters nurtured the rhetorical and conceptual work of natural history in the Enlightenment, and thus provide the clearest expression and reflection of the cultural changes in the idea of nature itself. The mobility of botanical objects opened up new imaginative, rhetorical, organizational, and material possibilities for the individuals I discuss in this dissertation. Through their letters and related natural history writings, I trace the paradox by which nature came to be seen as the embodiment of change, even as it was being categorized and classified in new ways.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 69/10 (2009). Pub. no. AAT 3330926.
Book
Wulf, Andrea;
(2008)
The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession
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Thesis
Murphy, Kathleen S.;
(2008)
Portals of Nature: Networks of Natural History in Eighteenth-Century British Plantation Societies
(/isis/citation/CBB001560808/)
Thesis
Condon, Adrienne L.;
(1996)
Transatlantic friends: The correspondence of Peter Collinson (1694-1768) and John Bartram (1699-1777)
(/isis/citation/CBB001565552/)
Article
McKinley, Daniel;
(1988)
Peter Collinson's curious amphibious quadruped (1753)
(/isis/citation/CBB000046587/)
Book
Slaughter, Thomas P.;
(1996)
The natures of John and William Bartram
(/isis/citation/CBB000074690/)
Article
Cappon, Lester J.;
(1974)
Retracing and mapping the Bartrams' southern travels
(/isis/citation/CBB000018555/)
Chapter
Fry, Joel T.;
(2011)
America's “Ancient Garden”: The Bartram Botanic Garden, 1728--1850
(/isis/citation/CBB001210291/)
Book
Hoffmann, Nancy E.;
Horne, John C. Van;
(2004)
America's Curious Botanist: A Tercentennial Reappraisal of John Bartram, 1699--1777
(/isis/citation/CBB000600305/)
Book
Bartram, William;
Hallock, Thomas;
Hoffmann, Nancy E.;
Fry, Joel T.;
(2010)
William Bartram, the Search for Nature's Design: Selected Art, Letters, and Unpublished Writings
(/isis/citation/CBB001200540/)
Thesis
Fairhead, Elizabeth S. C.;
(2005)
Essential Nature: Bartram's Garden and Natural History in Philadelphia, 1790--1825
(/isis/citation/CBB001561675/)
Book
Cutting, Rose Marie;
(1976)
John and William Bartram, William Byrd II, and St. John de Crévecoeur: A reference guide
(/isis/citation/CBB000027956/)
Book
Fishman, Gail;
(2000)
Journeys through Paradise: Pioneering Naturalists in the Southeast
(/isis/citation/CBB000100210/)
Article
Sam George;
(2014)
Carl Linnaeus, Erasmus Darwin and Anna Seward: Botanical Poetry and Female Education
(/isis/citation/CBB189590852/)
Article
Bettina Dietz;
(2016)
Linnaeus' Restless System: Translation as Textual Engineering in Eighteenth-Century Botany
(/isis/citation/CBB906139658/)
Book
Koerner, Lisbet;
(1999)
Linnaeus: Nature and Nation
(/isis/citation/CBB000111617/)
Article
Müller-Wille, Staffan;
(2003)
Joining Lapland and the Topinambes in Flourishing Holland: Center and Periphery in Linnaean Botany
(/isis/citation/CBB000740740/)
Book
Beretta, Marco;
Tosi, Alessandro;
(2007)
Linnaeus in Italy: The Spread of a Revolution in Science
(/isis/citation/CBB000772123/)
Article
Dietz, Bettina;
(2012)
Contribution and Co-Production: The Collaborative Culture of Linnaean Botany
(/isis/citation/CBB001251490/)
Chapter
Hoquet, Thierry;
(2008)
Linné et les systèmes: un commentaire de Fondements botaniques, section II (1736)
(/isis/citation/CBB001221145/)
Article
Eddy, Matthew D.;
(2010)
Tools for Reordering: Commonplacing and the Space of Words in Linnaeus' Philosophia Botanica
(/isis/citation/CBB001022581/)
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