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"Natural history literature-United States"
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Out of school and into nature : the Anna Comstock story
\"A picture book biography about naturalist and artist Anna Comstock (1854-1930), who defied social conventions and pursued the study of science. She pioneered a movement to encourage schools to conduct science and nature classes for children outdoors, thereby increasing students' interest in nature\" -- Provided by publisher.
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The truth of ecology : nature, culture, and literature in America
This book surveys trends in environmental thought in the US from the mid-19th century to the present day. Its author's chief interest is in ecocriticism — a new field of inquiry that focuses on environmental literature — and some key premises of which he calls into question. His perspective is, however, interdisciplinary: he considers literary alongside popular, philosophical, sociological, political, and scientific approaches to understanding the natural world, and attempts to weigh the relative strengths and weakness, and identify the biases of each approach. He also addresses a variety of more specific topics, including the shortcomings of arguments for the social construction of nature, the difference between literary and scientific realism, the supposed conflict between nature and culture, the American preoccupation with individual experience as reflected in the nature writing tradition, the difficulty of resolving ecological crises in light of the great complexity of nature, and the challenge of understanding all these issues from an interdisciplinary viewpoint that draws inspiration from both the arts and the sciences.
eBook
Environmental practice and early American literature
\"This original and provocative study tells the story of American literary history from the perspective of its environmental context. Weaving together close readings of early American texts with ecological histories of tobacco, potatoes, apples, and honey bees, Michael Ziser presents a method for literary criticism that explodes the conceptual distinction between the civilized and natural world. Beginning with the English exploration of Virginia in the sixteenth century, Ziser argues that the settlement of the \"New World\" - and the cultivation and exploitation of its bounty - dramatically altered how writers used language to describe the phenomena they encountered on the frontier. Examining the work of Harriot, Grainger, Cooper, Thoreau and others, Ziser reveals how these authors, whether consciously or not, transcribed the vibrant ecology of North America, and the ways that the environment helped codify a uniquely American literary aesthetic of lasting importance\"-- Provided by publisher.
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John Burroughs and the Place of Nature
This study situates John Burroughs, together with John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, as one of a trinity of thinkers who, between the Civil War and World War I, defined and secured a place for nature in mainstream American culture. Though not as well known today, Burroughs was the most popular American nature writer of his time. Prolific and consistent, he published scores of essays in influential large-circulation magazines and was often compared to Thoreau. Unlike Thoreau, however, whose reputation grew posthumously, Burroughs wasa celebrity during his lifetime: he wrote more than thirty books, enjoyed a continual high level of visibility, and saw his work taught widely in public schools. James Perrin Warren shows how Burroughs helped guide urban and suburban middle-class readers \"back to nature\" during a time of intense industrialization and urbanization. Warren discusses Burroughs's connections not only to Muir and Roosevelt but also to his forebears Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. By tracing the complex philosophical, creative, and temperamental lineage of these six giants, Warren shows how, in their friendships and rivalries, Burroughs, Muir, and Roosevelt made the high literary romanticism of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman relevant to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Americans. At the same time, Warren offers insights into the rise of the nature essay as a genre, the role of popular magazines as shapers and conveyors of public values, and the dynamism of place in terms of such opposed concepts as retreat and engagement, nature and culture, and wilderness and civilization. Because Warren draws on Burroughs's personal, critical, and philosophical writings as well as his better-known narrative essays, readers will come away with a more informed sense of Burroughs as a literary naturalist and a major early practitioner of ecocriticism. John Burroughs and the Place of Nature helps extend the map of America's cultural landscape during the period 1870-1920 by recovering an unfairly neglected practitioner of one of his era's most effective forces for change: nature writing.
eBook
Thomas Jefferson and the mammoth hunt : the true story of the quest for America's biggest bones
\"This rhyming non-fiction picture book tells about Thomas Jefferson's quest to find a woolly mammoth to disprove French Count Buffon's assertion that the animals of the New World are weak\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
The Poetics of Natural History
Winner of the 2000 American Studies Network Prize and the Literature and Language Award from the Association of American Publishers, Inc.Early American naturalists assembled dazzling collections of native flora and fauna, from John Bartram's botanical garden in Philadelphia and the artful display of animals in Charles Willson Peale's museum to P. T. Barnum's American Museum, infamously characterized by Henry James as \"halls of humbug.\" Yet physical collections were only one of the myriad ways that these naturalists captured, catalogued, and commemorated America's rich biodiversity. They also turned to writing and art, from John Edward Holbrook's forays into the fascinating world of herpetology to John James Audubon's masterful portraits of American birds. In this groundbreaking, now classic book, Christoph Irmscher argues that early American natural historians developed a distinctly poetic sensibility that allowed them to imagine themselves as part of, and not apart from, their environment. He also demonstrates what happens to such inclusiveness in the hands of Harvard scientist-turned Amazonian explorer Louis Agassiz, whose racist pseudoscience appalled his student William James. This expanded, full-color edition of The Poetics of Natural History features a preface and art from award-winning artist Rosamond Purcell and invites the reader to be fully immersed in an era when the boundaries between literature, art, and science became fluid.
eBook
Fighting for the forest : how FDR's Civilian Conservation Corps helped save America
\"The story of the Civilian Conservation Corps--one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal projects that helped save a generation of Americans\"--Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Good Observers of Nature
In \"Good Observers of Nature\" Tina Gianquitto examines nineteenth-century American women's intellectual and aesthetic experiences 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.
eBook
Atavistic Tendencies
The post-Darwinian theory of atavism forecasted obstacles to human progress in the reappearance of throwback physical or cultural traits. In this stimulating work, Dana Seitler explores how modernity itself is an atavism. Examining late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century science, fiction, and photography, Seitler discovers how modern thought oriented itself around this paradigm of obsolescence and return—one that served to sustain ideologies of gender, sexuality, and race.
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