Reviews
Recommended.
I consider this critically innovative and beautifully written book essential reading not only for scholars and enthusiasts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literatures, but for anyone interested in gaining new insights into the literary history of environmentalism.
... highly readable account...
Natures in Translation offers a sorely needed commentary on how Romantic thinkers understood the environment and represents a much-needed reminder of the possibilities interdisciplinary scholarship has to illuminate our understandings of environmental history... richly illustrated and evocatively argued...
One of the most authoritative and absorbing studies of the year is Alan Bewell's Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History
An impressive work of third-wave ecocriticism that takes a decisively historical approach to the politics of Romantic nature, Natures in Translation joins other important studies that have enhanced our understanding of Romantic natural history, such as Ashton Nichols’s Beyond Romantic Ecocriticism: Toward Urbanatural Roosting (2011) and Theresa M. Kelley’s Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture (2012).
Natures in Translation is timely, powerful, and unexpectedly moving.
The book is written in an easy and enjoyable style enlivened by anecdotes from the Romantic period and topical references that make its relevance to our world today clear. The sheer range of critical, historical, political, and scientific material brought to bear is hugely impressive. The argument is persuasive, the examples used are convincing, and the whole moves to a conclusion that has been well prepared for but which is in in no way repetitive. There are also some nice moments where alternative perspectives are offered, which serve to bolster and confirm the central points. Natures in Translation is a central text for students and scholars of Romantic-period literature.
By integrating the histories of literature and science, this book establishes exemplary conditions for the scholarly retrieval of these natures.
This fascinating and ambitious book takes on the concept of nature, bringing together its literary and scientific senses with chapters on poetry, travel, and natural history writing. Natures in Translation is deeply interdisciplinary, uniting literary, postcolonial, and environmental studies with the history of science to create an original and very substantial contribution to the study of Romanticism.
Book Details
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction: Natures in Translation
1 Erasmus Darwin’s Cosmopolitan Nature
2 Traveling Natures
3 Translating Early Australian Natural History
4 An England of the Mind
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction: Natures in Translation
1 Erasmus Darwin’s Cosmopolitan Nature
2 Traveling Natures
3 Translating Early Australian Natural History
4 An England of the Mind: Gilbert White and the Black-bobs of Selborne.
5 William Bartram’s Travels and the Contested Natures of Southeast America
6 "I see around me things which you cannot see": William Wordsworth and the Historical Ecology of Human Passion
7 John Clare and The Ghosts of Natures Past
8 Of Weeds and Men: Evolution and the Science of Modern Natures
9 Frankenstein and the Origin and Extinction of Species
Notes
Works Cited
Index