In ""Good Observers of Nature"", Tina Gianquitto examines
nineteenth-century American women's intellectual and aesthetic
experience of nature and investigates the linguistic, perceptual,
and scientific systems that were available to women to describe
those experiences. Many women writers of this period used the
natural world as a platform for discussing issues of domesticity,
education, and the nation. To what extent, asks Gianquitto, did
these writers challenge the prevalent sentimental narrative modes
(like those used in the popular flower language books) and use
scientific terminology to describe the world around them? The book
maps the intersections of the main historical and narrative
trajectories that inform the answer to this question: the changing
literary representations of the natural world in texts produced by
women from the 1820s to the 1880s and the developments in science
from the Enlightenment to the advent of evolutionary biology.
Though Gianquitto considers a range of women's nature writing
(botanical manuals, plant catalogs, travel narratives, seasonal
journals, scientific essays), she focuses on four writers and their
most influential works: Almira Phelps (""Familiar Lectures on
Botany"", 1829), Margaret Fuller (""Summer on the Lakes"", in
1843), Susan Fenimore Cooper (""Rural Hours"", 1850), and Mary
Treat (""Home Studies in Nature"", 1885). From these writings
emerges a set of common concerns about the interaction of reason
and emotion in the study of nature, the best vocabularies for
representing objects in nature (local, scientific, or moral), and
the competing systems for ordering the natural world (theological,
taxonomic, or aesthetic). This is an illuminating study about the
culturally assumed relationship between women, morality, and
science.
General
Imprint: |
University of Georgia Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
July 2007 |
First published: |
July 2007 |
Authors: |
Tina Gianquitto
|
Dimensions: |
229 x 152 x 15mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback
|
Pages: |
224 |
Edition: |
annotated edition |
ISBN-13: |
978-0-8203-2919-2 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
0-8203-2919-3 |
Barcode: |
9780820329192 |
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