Rooted in a thriving culture of amateur natural history, the
keeping of nature journals and diaries flourished in
late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century Britain. As
prescientific worldviews ceded to a more materialist outlook
informed by an explosion of factual knowledge, lovers of nature
both famous and obscure began to use daily composition as a quest
for information about and a celebration of their surroundings. A
central site of encounter, discovery, and expression, nature
diaries took part in a vigorous cultural dialogue, performing, in
an era called the "golden age" of nature writing, an engaging
alchemy of language, science, and art.
In "Daybooks of Discovery: Nature Diaries in Britain, 1770-1870,
" Mary Ellen Bellanca offers the first critical study of this
genre. In looking at the diaries of Gilbert White, Dorothy
Wordsworth, Emily Shore, George Eliot, and Gerard Manley Hopkins,
as well as those of lesser-known figures, she explores the writers'
pursuit of empirical knowledge of nature for its own sake, rather
than focusing on Romantic nature philosophy or on 'ecology' as a
metaphor for spiritual connectedness. Each chapter situates an
individual author's journals amid contemporary discourses of
natural history, examining how journal writing enabled and mediated
the diarist's practice as naturalist.
A melange of fact, narrative, and imaginative re-creation, the
nature diary played a crucial role in literature and science in a
period of burgeoning knowledge about the natural world. For
students and scholars of environmental history, the history of
science, ecocriticism, and Victorian studies, "Daybooks of
Discovery" will prove an essential tool for understanding this
distinct genre.
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