The Poetics of Natural History: From John Bartram to William James [Hardcover]

Christoph Irmscher (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1999

Book features 64 b + w illustrations

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

American natural history owes much to gifted amateurs who, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, traveled widely, collected willy-nilly, and then, back at home, devoted years to sorting through their collections and cataloging their contents--an enterprise that introduced scientific rigor into what had been a kind of hobby. So writes literary scholar Christoph Irmscher, who, in exploring the aesthetic aspects of American natural history, considers the careers of several early naturalists, including Charles Willson Peale, John Bartram, John James Audubon, Louis Agassiz, and, in an unlikely turn, the showman P.T. Barnum, who turned a penchant for collecting oddments of nature into an itinerant freak show. All of these, Irmscher writes, delighted in "transforming relatively random assemblages of natural collectibles into works of art," works that would in many instances form the foundations for what are today important collections. Among the many pleasant surprises in Irmscher's narrative is an account of an 1865 trip organized by Agassiz to the Amazon River. One of the participants was the young William James, who would later become a famed psychologist and who wrote admiringly of Agassiz's relentless energy in pursuit of scientific specimens while admitting, "If there is anything I hate it is collecting." Irmscher's elegant book will be of interest to historians of 19th-century science, and to general readers with a fondness for the work of the brilliant, often eccentric, amateurs of the past. --Gregory McNamee

Review

"The Poetics of Natural History is a learned and inventive study of natural history discourse in the 18th - and 19th-century United States, and will be of great interest to students of literary and cultural history, as well as historian of science and art." - -- Lawrence Buell, Harvard University

"This remarkable study revives a brilliant, exciting body of American writing - pre-Darwinian natural history and culture. The Poetics of Natural History is scholarly, tough, but at the same time a wonderful read, making the case for the art of natural-history writing, while recognizing that behind that art was intense, disturbing, often violent experience. This book will make a difference." -- George Levine, Author, Darwin and the Novelist and Lifebirds

...moves gracefully across a broad American intellectual and historical landscape with an impressive stylistic mastery that is revealing and rewarding. -- Nineteenth-Century Literature, December 1999

Irmscher ... shows how the purposes of each naturalist's trips, writings, and displays were affected by the ideas of their society. In the case of Agassiz and his trip to South America, incidentally accompanied by William James, Irmscher makes clear how the purposes of the trip, including photography of humans, were largely driven by Agassiz's desire to refute Darwinian ideas and in particular to demonstrate a hierarchy among human races. As one reads about the travails of fieldwork, someone familiar with the stresses of working in difficult areas can enjoy contrasting the problems of past and present fieldwork. But an alert reader will also remember "hearing" 19th-century ideas about natural history of various animals that seem to have been retained and repeated from some 19th-century authors and more importantly, 19th-century museums. General readers; upper-division undergraduates through professionals. -- David Bardack, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Illinois at Chicago, in Choice, November 1999

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 376 pages
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press (June 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813526159
• ISBN-13: 978-0813526157
• Product Dimensions: 10.4 x 7.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,455,600 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1.0 out of 5 stars Terrible Scanning and OCR Job on Fine Book, January 6, 2012

By 

William Cronon (Madison, WI) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Poetics of Natural History: From John Bartram to William James (Kindle Edition)

This is an important and valuable book that anyone interested in the history and literary attributes of American pre-twentieth-century natural history writing will want to read...but the Kindle version of the book is so appallingly filled with errors that Amazon should pull it from the website until it's been fixed. If Rutgers University Press is responsible for the scanning and OCR work, it needs to rethink its quality control protocols, since scholars count on university presses to be much more careful than this about the accuracy of the editions they prepare. I'm delighted that presses like Rutgers are trying to make important backlist titles like this one available, and hope they'll continue to do so...but quality control is just as important with digital editions as with print ones, especially, for scholarly books like this one.