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Clandestine Marriage

Botany and Romantic Culture

Theresa M. Kelley

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Botany in the romantic era played a role in debates about life, nature, and knowledge, as evidenced in this ambitious, beautifully illustrated study.

Winner, 2012 British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize

Romanticism was a cultural and intellectual movement characterized by discovery, revolution, and the poetic as well as by the philosophical relationship between people and nature. Botany sits at the intersection where romantic scientific and literary discourses meet. Clandestine Marriage explores the meaning and methods of how plants were represented and reproduced in scientific...

Botany in the romantic era played a role in debates about life, nature, and knowledge, as evidenced in this ambitious, beautifully illustrated study.

Winner, 2012 British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize

Romanticism was a cultural and intellectual movement characterized by discovery, revolution, and the poetic as well as by the philosophical relationship between people and nature. Botany sits at the intersection where romantic scientific and literary discourses meet. Clandestine Marriage explores the meaning and methods of how plants were represented and reproduced in scientific, literary, artistic, and material cultures of the period.

Theresa M. Kelley synthesizes romantic debates about taxonomy and morphology, the contemporary interest in books and magazines devoted to plant study and images, and writings by such authors as Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Letitia Barbauld. Period botanical paintings of flowers are reproduced in vibrant color, bringing her argument and the romantics' passion for plants to life.

In addition to exploring botanic thought and practice in the context of British romanticism, Kelley also looks to the German philosophical traditions of Kant, Hegel, and Goethe and to Charles Darwin’s reflections on orchids and plant pollination. Her interdisciplinary approach allows a deeper understanding of a time when exploration of the natural world was a culture-wide enchantment.

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Reviews

Any college-level science holding and many a history collection will appreciate the multi-facted coverage.

Clandestine Marriage makes an important contribution to our understanding of the essential role that plants played in the conceptual transformation of nature as a place where taxonomic hegemony reigned to one complicated by chance and contingency. More than this, Kelley’s focus on plants as both insistently 'idea' and 'material' furthers the conversationabout why plants—as plants—mattered so much to so many for so long.

Kelley's comprehensive survey of the riches of Romantic botany and botanizing is a book that helps to shape our understanding of the sources of our own current thinking and the distances that thinking has traveled from the pagan cosmology of Erasmus Darwin.

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Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6.125
x
9.25
Pages
400
ISBN
9781421405179
Illustration Description
49 color illus.
Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Botanical Matters
3. Botany's Publics and Privates
4. Botanizing Women
5. Clare's Commonable Plants
Interlude One: Mala's Garden
6. Reading Matter and

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Botanical Matters
3. Botany's Publics and Privates
4. Botanizing Women
5. Clare's Commonable Plants
Interlude One: Mala's Garden
6. Reading Matter and Paint
Interlude Two: A Romantic Garden
7. Restless Romantic Plants and Philosophers
8. Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Author Bio
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Theresa M. Kelley

Theresa M. Kelley is the Marjorie and Lorin Tiefenthaler Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of Reinventing Allegory.