The terms “cosmopolitan” and “invasive” name ideas that have long figured prominently in the practices, the methods, and the unexamined assumptions of Victorian studies. These categories also shape the study of plants, both now and in the nineteenth century, along with related terms like “native,” “exotic,” and “hybrid.” “Invasion biology,” for example, currently describes the study of how nonnative species spread around the world, and the phrase “nativism-cosmopolitanism dichotomy” has been used to describe the impasse between different approaches to global plant distribution and migration. This paper will put these variable disciplinary conceptions of “cosmopolitan” and “invasive” into conversation with each other, offering a methodological reflection with the goal of clarifying their meanings and applications in and for current scholarship of the Victorian period. If ecological uses of these ideas, like aesthetic and political uses, are rooted in the nineteenth century, their disparate strands have not yet been sufficiently disentangled. What difference does it make to speak of invasive plants as compared to human invaders? How does our sense of cosmopolitanism, empire, and invasion change when pressure is exerted from other fields? Perhaps most importantly, what are the ethical dimensions of these concepts, especially when nonhuman entities are included?
...MoreSimilar Citations
Chapter
Lynn Voskuil;
(2017)
Victorian Orchids and the Forms of Ecological Society
(/isis/citation/CBB040387941/)
Book
Höxtermann, Ekkehard;
Kaasch, Joachim;
Kaasch, Michael;
(2001)
Berichte zur Geschichte und Theorie der Ökologie und weitere Beiträge zur 9. Jahrestagung der DGGTB in Neuburg a.d. Donau 2000
(/isis/citation/CBB000101514/)
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/)
Article
Endersby, Jim;
(2011)
A Life More Ordinary: The Dull Life but Interesting Times of Joseph Dalton Hooker
(/isis/citation/CBB001220954/)
Chapter
McCracken, Donald P.;
(2005)
Fraternity in the Age of Jingoism: The British Imperial Botanical and Forestry Network
(/isis/citation/CBB000774970/)
Article
Axelby, Richard;
(2008)
Calcutta Botanic Garden and the Colonial Re-Ordering of the Indian Environment
(/isis/citation/CBB000931212/)
Article
Christie Harner;
(2020)
Animal and Social Ecologies in Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey
(/isis/citation/CBB719406434/)
Book
Toby Musgrave;
(2020)
The Multifarious Mr. Banks: From Botany Bay to Kew, The Natural Historian Who Shaped the World
(/isis/citation/CBB640402861/)
Book
Anna K. Sagal;
(2021)
Botanical Entanglements: Women, Natural Science, and the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England
(/isis/citation/CBB259998433/)
Article
Eleni Manolaraki;
(2015)
Hebraei Liquores: The Balsam of Judaea in Pliny’s Natural History
(/isis/citation/CBB019043844/)
Book
Freinkel, Susan;
(2007)
American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree
(/isis/citation/CBB000850679/)
Chapter
Timothy P. Barnard;
(2015)
The Rafflesia in the Natural and Imperial Imagination of the East India Company in Southeast Asia
(/isis/citation/CBB847157426/)
Book
Drayton, Richard Harry;
(2000)
Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World
(/isis/citation/CBB000110698/)
Chapter
Deepak Kumar;
(2015)
Botanical Explorations and the East India Company: Revisiting "Plant Colonialism"
(/isis/citation/CBB885700738/)
Chapter
Anna Winterbottom;
(2015)
Medicine and Botany in the Making of Madras, 1680-1720
(/isis/citation/CBB132574622/)
Book
Kelley, Theresa M.;
(2012)
Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB001321257/)
Essay Review
Lustig, V.;
(2001)
Botanists Sow, Historians Reap
(/isis/citation/CBB000100507/)
Article
Ogborn, Miles;
(2013)
Talking Plants: Botany and Speech in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica
(/isis/citation/CBB001420228/)
Article
Parama Roy;
(2021)
The Strange Ecologies of Empire
(/isis/citation/CBB019172597/)
Thesis
Mollendorf, Miranda Andrea;
(2013)
The World in a Book: Robert John Thornton's “Temple of Flora” (1797--1812)
(/isis/citation/CBB001567535/)
Be the first to comment!