Hartendorf-Wallach, Bregtje (Author)
The dissertation examines and rehabilitates the cultural significance of "the spectacle of nature", which is a ubiquitous term in eighteenth-century French and English natural historical texts, travel literature, descriptive poetry and aesthetic treatises. Popularized by Noël-Antoine Pluche's bestselling and much-translated book entitled Le Spectacle de la Nature (1732-1750), known in England as Spectacle de la Nature or Nature Display'd , the concept embodies an alternative outlook on nature that privileges the external observation of particular natural historical objects by an amateur audience. Distilling nature into a series of highlights, the spectacle of nature entails the prescription and acquisition of specific visual skills that allow for an aesthetic viewing experience of selected natural productions and an acute appreciation of their specific awe-inspiring human utility. As such, the concept of the spectacle of nature constitutes an important antecedent to nascent modern exhibitionary practices of the end of the eighteenth century and announces a specifically modern poetics of display. Four case studies show the significance of the idea of the spectacle of nature in the eighteenth century and the resultant discursive shift in the conceptualization of nature that it denotes. The first chapter explores Pluche's Spectacle de la Nature and its contributions to defining the idea of nature in spectacular terms. The second and third chapters chart the creation of textual and object-based spectacles of nature during and upon the return of Captain James Cook's Endeavour Voyage (1768-1771), with the help of the contemporary, emerging natural historical technology of acclimatization to describe the transformations and cultural processes at work. The fourth chapter investigates the political and social dimensions of the spectacle of nature during the French Revolution in Helen Maria Williams' English translation of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul and Virginia (1793), while revisiting acclimatization and its failed outcomes. The epilogue on early panoramas of Paris and Louis-Sébastien Mercier's panoramic texts Tableau de Paris (1781-1788) and Le Nouveau Paris (1798) traces the transformations of a natural riverfront space known as La Grenouillère, or the Frog Pond, redefining the spectacle of nature as an artificial urban construct at the turn of the nineteenth century.
...MoreDescription Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 73/03, Sep 2012. Proquest Document ID: 911027244.
Article
Williams, Glyn;
(2013)
Scurvy on the Pacific Voyages in the Age of Cook
(/isis/citation/CBB001200828/)
Chapter
Elliott, Paul;
(2012)
Erasmus Darwin's Trees
(/isis/citation/CBB001421358/)
Chapter
Cook, Elizabeth Heckendorn;
(2012)
The Vocal Stump: The Politics of Tree-Felling in Swift's “On Cutting down the Old Thorn at Market Hill”
(/isis/citation/CBB001421360/)
Article
Serna, Pierre;
(2014)
The Republican Menagerie: Animal Politics in the French Revolution
(/isis/citation/CBB001201412/)
Chapter
Hiatt, Alfred;
(2011)
Terra Australis and the Idea of Antipodes
(/isis/citation/CBB001201506/)
Book
Williams, Glyn;
(2013)
Naturalists at Sea: Scientific Travellers from Dampier to Darwin
(/isis/citation/CBB001450368/)
Article
Quilley, Geoff;
(2014)
Introduction: Mapping the Art of Travel and Exploration
(/isis/citation/CBB001450330/)
Thesis
Lindquist, Jason Howard;
(2007)
A “Pure Excess of Complexity”: Tropical Surfeit, the Observing Subject, and the Text, 1773--1871
(/isis/citation/CBB001560523/)
Article
Wintroub, Michael;
(2009)
The Heavens Inscribed: The Instrumental Poetry of the Virgin in Early Modern France
(/isis/citation/CBB000932108/)
Chapter
Raman, Shankar;
(2012)
Constructing Selves, Making Publics: Geometry and Poetry in Descartes and Sidney
(/isis/citation/CBB001201597/)
Chapter
Maierhofer, Waltraud;
(2012)
Goethe and Forestry
(/isis/citation/CBB001421369/)
Thesis
Higgins, John Robert;
(2011)
Fossil Poetry, the Birth of Geology, and the Romantic Imagination, 1790--1860
(/isis/citation/CBB001567320/)
Article
Wallmann, Elisabeth;
(2014)
On Poets and Insects: Figures of the Human and Figures of the Insect in Pierre Perrin's Divers insectes, 1645
(/isis/citation/CBB001201405/)
Article
Meyzie, Philippe;
(2015)
La construction de la renommée des produits des terroirs: Acteurs et enjeux d’un marché de la gourmandise en France (XVIIe-début XIXe siècle)
(/isis/citation/CBB001500566/)
Article
Kinukawa, Tomomi;
(2013)
Learned vs. Commercial? The Commodification of Nature in Early Modern Natural History Specimen Exchanges in England, Germany, and the Netherlands
(/isis/citation/CBB001320518/)
Book
Anna K. Sagal;
(2021)
Botanical Entanglements: Women, Natural Science, and the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England
(/isis/citation/CBB259998433/)
Article
Melissa Bailes;
(2016)
Literary Plagiarism and Scientific Originality in the "Trans-Atlantic Wilderness" of Goldsmith, Aikin, and Barbauld
(/isis/citation/CBB069069881/)
Book
Stefanie Stockhorst;
Jürgen Overhoff;
Penelope J. Corfield;
(2021)
Human-Animal Interactions in the Eighteenth Century: From Pests and Predators to Pets, Poems and Philosophy
(/isis/citation/CBB446524520/)
Article
Bailes, Melissa;
(2009)
The Evolution of the Plagiarist: Natural History in Anna Seward's Order of Poetics
(/isis/citation/CBB001030343/)
Book
Anna Winterbottom;
(2016)
Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World
(/isis/citation/CBB551587576/)
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