Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era
Bodies of Knowledge

Examines the massive impact of colonial exploration on British scientific and literary activity between the 1760s and 1830s.

Tim Fulford (Author), Debbie Lee (Author), Peter J. Kitson (Author)

9780521829199, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 September 2004

348 pages, 23 b/w illus.
23.6 x 16.3 x 2.3 cm, 0.625 kg

'This is a wonderfully provocative book, replete with broad speculations, new ideas, forgotten facts, and neglected histories. Jointly conceived by three authors, it represents the best of interdisciplinary inquiry and scholarly engagement. The clarity of its introduction assures from the start an ongoing usefulness to students, general readers, and scholars.' CLIO

In 1768, Captain James Cook made the most important scientific voyage of the eighteenth century. He was not alone: scores of explorers like Cook, travelling in the name of science, brought new worlds and new peoples within the horizon of European knowledge for the first time. Their discoveries changed the course of science. Old scientific disciplines, such as astronomy and botany, were transformed; new ones, like craniology and comparative anatomy, were brought into being. Scientific disciplines, in turn, pushed literature of the period towards new subjects, forms and styles. Works as diverse as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Wordsworth's Excursion responded to the explorers' and scientists' latest discoveries. This wide-ranging and well-illustrated study shows how literary Romanticism arose partly in response to science's appropriation of explorers' encounters with foreign people and places and how it, in turn, changed the profile of science and exploration.

List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
A note on the text
Frequently cited texts
Introduction: bodies of knowledge
Part I. Exploration, Science and Literature: 1. Sir Joseph Banks and his networks
2. Tahiti in London
London in Tahiti: tools of power
3. Indian flowers and Romantic Orientalism
4. Mental travellers: Banks, African exploration and the Romantic imagination
5. Banks, Bligh and the breadfruit: slave plantations, tropical islands and the rhetoric of Romanticism
6. Exploration, headhunting and race theory: the skull beneath the skin
7. Theories of terrestrial magnetism and the search for the poles
Part II. British Science and Literature in the Context of Empire: 8. 'Man electrified man': Romantic revolution and the legacy of Benjamin Franklin
9. The beast within: vaccination, Romanticism and the Jenneration of disease
10. Britain's little black boys and the technologies of benevolence
Conclusion
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]