Includes bibliographical references (pages 209-262) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: Revealing the strawman, or, The historical hoodwinking of Romanticism -- Botany's seasonal disorder : Thomson's progessive time, conjectural histories, and the backwardness of Spring -- Linnaeus's botanical clocks : chronobiological mechanisms in the scientific poetry of Erasmus Darwin, Charlotte Smith, and Felicia Hemans -- Transformations of gender, race, and poetic sensibility : Maria Riddell's transatlantic botany and biopolitics -- Cultivated for consumption : botany, colonial cannibalism, and national/natural history in Sydney Owenson's Wild Irish girl -- "On the green margin" : place, sensibility, and originality in Charlotte Smith's "Flora" -- Botany and madness : Anna Seward, sensibility, and the floral insanities of Darwin, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Clare -- Conclusion: Sensibility, originality, and scientific literature : De Quincey, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, and the critical fate of Romanticism.
Summary:
"This book renovates understandings of sensibility and its importance to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century movement of scientific literature within genres such as poetry, novels, travel writing, children's literature, and even literary criticism that engage with the natural sciences, and especially with botany, by male and female writers, including Charlotte Smith, Anna Seward, Maria Riddell, Anna Barbauld, and Sydney Owenson, among many others."-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.