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

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

Presents a fascinating history of the nature-study movement of the late 19th century--during which Americans escaped industrialization to explore the flora and fauna of the countryside--demonstrating its significance to American environmental thought and politics and showing its lasting effect on American culture and society.

This collection of essays responds to the intense interest that the relations between the discourses of literature (and other cultural practices) and those of science have obtained throughout various fields of study. Spanning a period between the mid-nineteenth century and the twenty-first century, the work collected here is firmly focused

This book discusses how literary writers re-envisioned species survival and racial uplift through ecological and biogeographical concepts of dispersal. It will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth-Century American literature and Literature and the Environment.