Working with the technologies of pen and paper, scissors and glue, naturalists in early modern England, Scotland, and Wales wrote, revised, and recombined their words, sometimes over a period of many ...years, before fixing them in printed form. They built up their stocks of papers by sharing these materials through postal and less formal carrier services. They exchanged letters, loose notes, drawings and plans, commonplace books, as well as lengthy treatises, ever-expanding repositories for new knowledge about nature and history as it accumulated through reading, observation, correspondence, and conversation. These textual collections grew alongside cabinets of natural specimens, antiquarian objects, and other curiosities-insects pinned in boxes, leaves and flowers pressed in books, rocks and fossils, ancient coins and amulets, and drafts of stone monuments and inscriptions. The goal of all this collecting and sharing, Elizabeth Yale claims, was to create channels through which naturalists and antiquaries could pool their fragmented knowledge of the hyperlocal and curious into an understanding and representation of Britain as a unified historical and geographical space.
Sociable Knowledgepays careful attention to the concrete and the particular: the manuscript almost lost off the back of the mail carrier's cart, the proper ways to package live plants for transport, the kin relationships through which research questionnaires were distributed. The book shows how naturalists used print instruments to garner financing and content from correspondents and how they relied upon research travel-going out into the field-to make and refresh social connections. By moving beyond an easy distinction between print and scribal cultures, Yale reconstructs not just the collaborations of seventeenth-century practitioners who were dispersed across city and country, but also the ways in which the totality of their exchange practices structured early modern scientific knowledge.
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.
Flies of the genus Drosophila, and particularly those of the species Drosophila melanogaster, are best known as laboratory organisms. As with all model organisms, they were domesticated for empirical ...studies, but they also continue to exist as wild populations. Decades of research on these flies in the laboratory have produced astounding and important insights into basic biological processes, but we have only scratched the surface of what they have to offer as research organisms. An outstanding challenge now is to build on this knowledge and explore how natural history has shaped D. melanogaster in order to advance our understanding of biology more generally.
Study of the sea--both in terms of human interaction with it and its literary representation--has been largely ignored by ecocritics. InShakespeare's Ocean,Dan Brayton foregrounds the maritime ...dimension of a writer whose plays and poems have had an enormous impact on literary notions of nature and, in so doing, plots a new course for ecocritical scholarship.
Shakespeare lived during a time of great expansion of geographical knowledge. The world in which he imagined his plays was newly understood to be a sphere covered with water. In vital readings of works ranging fromThe Comedy of Errorsto the valedictoryThe Tempest,Brayton demonstrates Shakespeare's remarkable conceptual mastery of the early modern maritime world and reveals a powerful benthic imagination at work.
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