Article ID: CBB968206173

Narrative and Natural History in the Eighteenth Century (2017)

unapi

In the eighteenth century, natural histories of animals incorporated narratives about animal behaviour and narratives of discovery and experimentation. Naturalists used first-person accounts to link the stories of their scientific investigations to the stories of the animal lives they were studying. Understanding nature depended on narratives that shifted back and forth in any given text between animal and human, and between individual cases and generalizations about species. This paper explores the uses of narrative through examples from the work of René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur and Abraham Trembley. In all cases, narrative took the genre of natural history well beyond straightforward description and classification. Prose accounts of insect actions and mechanisms worked in tandem with visual narratives embedded in the accompanying illustrations, where artists developed strategies for representing sequences of minute changes over time. By throwing into relief the narrative sections of natural histories, the examples considered here expose the role played by these tales of encounters with the insect world in the making of natural historical knowledge.

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Article Mary S. Morgan; M. Norton Wise (2017) Narrative Science and Narrative Knowing. Introduction to Special Issue on Narrative Science. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (pp. 1-5). unapi

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Authors & Contributors
Dawson, Virginia Parker
Terrall, Mary
Gibson, Susannah
Hans Aili
Céline M. Stantina
Guy M. Sechrist
Concepts
Natural history
Animals
Comparative physiology
Plants
Science and art
Taxidermy
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
Places
London (England)
France
Great Britain
Virginia (U.S.)
South America
Germany
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