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.
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.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Acknowledgments ix
List of Abbreviations xi
1 Introduction 1
2 Botanical Matters 17
3 Botany's Publics and Privates 52
4 Botanizing Women 90
5 Clare's Commonable Plants 126
Interlude 1 Mala's Garden: A Caribbean Interlude 159
6 Reading Matter and Paint 162
Interlude 2 A Romantic Garden: Shelley on Vitality and Decay 210
7 Restless Romantic Plants and Philosophers 216
8 Conclusion 246
Notes 263
Bibliography 299
Index 325
What People are Saying About This
Alan John Bewell
Richly documented and deeply researched, Clandestine Marriage displays a wide conversancy with literary criticism and the history of science, recognizing the ways in which the meaning of plants regularly exceeds or disrupts the conceptual categories in which they are placed or found.
From the Publisher
Richly documented and deeply researched, Clandestine Marriage displays a wide conversancy with literary criticism and the history of science, recognizing the ways in which the meaning of plants regularly exceeds or disrupts the conceptual categories in which they are placed or found.—Alan John Bewell, University of Toronto
