Bewell, Alan (Author)
Johns Hopkins University Press
Physical Details: 416 pages
Language: English
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.
...MoreReview Megan Kitching (2019) Review of "Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History". Archives of Natural History (pp. 174-175).
Review Lewis Pyenson (2018) Review of "Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 404-405).
Review Geoff Bil (2018) Review of "Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History". Annals of Science: The History of Science and Technology (pp. 64-65).
Similar Citations
Book
Longair, Sarah;
McAleer, John;
(2012)
Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience
(/isis/citation/CBB001201464/)
Book
MacLeod, Roy;
(2000)
Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise
(/isis/citation/CBB000110572/)
Article
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker;
(2019)
From Eden to Savagery and Civilization: British Colonialism and Humanity in the Development of Natural History, ca. 1600–1840
(/isis/citation/CBB413793567/)
Article
Greer, Kirsten A.;
(2008)
Placing Colonial Ornithology: Imperial Ambiguities in Upper Canada, 1791--1841
(/isis/citation/CBB001211517/)
Article
MacLeod, Roy;
(2010)
The Royal Society and the Commonwealth: Old Friendships, New Frontiers
(/isis/citation/CBB001022760/)
Book
Barbara Hahn;
(2020)
Technology in the Industrial Revolution
(/isis/citation/CBB086776543/)
Article
Plumb, Christopher;
(2010)
“In Fact, One Cannot See It without Laughing”: The Spectacle of the Kangaroo in London, 1770--1830
(/isis/citation/CBB001022479/)
Article
J'Nese Williams;
(2021)
Plantation Botany: Slavery and the Infrastructure of Government Science in the St. Vincent Botanic Garden, 1765–1820
(/isis/citation/CBB785011260/)
Book
Newell, Jennifer;
(2010)
Trading Nature: Tahitians, Europeans, and Ecological Exchange
(/isis/citation/CBB001230901/)
Thesis
Menon, Minakshi;
(2013)
Making Useful Knowledge: British Naturalists in Colonial India, 1784--1820
(/isis/citation/CBB001567462/)
Book
Perkins, David;
(2003)
Romanticism and Animal Rights
(/isis/citation/CBB000770182/)
Book
Tommaso, Lisa Di;
(2012)
Art of the First Fleet: Images of Nature
(/isis/citation/CBB001252604/)
Article
Sandra Rebok;
(2014)
Transatlantic Views of Nature
(/isis/citation/CBB308406816/)
Article
Melissa Bailes;
(2018)
Cultivated for Consumption: Botany, Colonial Cannibalism, and National/Natural History in Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl
(/isis/citation/CBB800185902/)
Chapter
Wellenreuther, Hermann;
(2011)
Britain's Political and Economic Response to the Emerging Colonial Economic Independence
(/isis/citation/CBB001214726/)
Book
Holmes, Richard;
(2008)
The Age of Wonder
(/isis/citation/CBB001024401/)
Chapter
Lehman, Scott;
(2011)
Mapping Havana in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1740--1762
(/isis/citation/CBB001221183/)
Book
Parrish, Susan Scott;
(2006)
American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World
(/isis/citation/CBB000600679/)
Article
Porter, Charlotte M.;
(2008)
Natural History Discourse and Collections: The Roles of Collectors in the Southeastern Colonies of North America
(/isis/citation/CBB001022470/)
Book
Kragh, Helge;
(2005)
Natur, Nytte og Ånd, 1730--1850
(/isis/citation/CBB001031659/)
Be the first to comment!