"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"--
Within key texts of Romantic-era aesthetics, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, and other writers and theorists pointed to the poet, naturalist, and physician Erasmus Darwin as exemplifying a lack of originality and sensibility in the periods scientific literature--the very qualities that such literature had actually sought to achieve. The success of this strawman tactic in establishing Romantic-era principles resulted in the historical devaluation of numerous other, especially female, imaginative authors, creating misunderstandings about the aesthetic intentions of the periods scientific literature that continue to hinder and mislead scholars even today.
Regenerating Romanticism demonstrates that such strategies enabled some literary critics and arbiters of Romantic-era aesthetics to portray literature and science as locked in competition with one another while also establishing standards for the literary canon that mirrored developing ideas of scientific or biological sexism and racism. With this groundbreaking study, Melissa Bailes 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, childrens literature, and literary criticism that obviously and technically engage with the natural sciences.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Revealing the Strawman; or, the Historical Hoodwinking of
Romanticism
1. Botany's Seasonal Disorder: Thomson's Progressive Time, Conjectural
Histories, and the Backwardness of Spring
2. Linnaeus's Botanical Clocks: Chronobiological Mechanisms in the Scientific
Poetry of Erasmus Darwin, Charlotte Smith, and Felicia Hemans
3. Transformations of Gender, Race, and Poetic Sensibility: Maria Riddell's
Transatlantic Botany and Biopolitics
4. Cultivated for Consumption: Botany, Colonial Cannibalism, and
National/Natural History in Sydney Owenson's The Wild Irish Girl
5. "On the green margin": Place, Sensibility, and Originality in Charlotte
Smith's "Flora"
6. Botany and Madness: Anna Seward, Sensibility, and the Floral Insanities of
Darwin, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Clare
Conclusion: De Quincey, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, and the Critical Fate of
Romanticism and Scientific Literature
Notes
Bibliography
Melissa Bailes is Associate Professor of English at Tulane University and the author of Questioning Nature: British Women's Scientific Writing and Literary Originality, 1750-1830 (Virginia).
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