Accepted Poster Session: Romantic Natural History: Literature and Science in the Century Before Darwin's Origin (1859)

Title: Romantic Natural History: Literature and Science in the Century Before Darwin's Origin (1859)

Author: Ashton Nichols, Walter E. Beach '56 Distinguished Chair in Sustainability Studies, Dickinson College

Abstract: This poster describes a website entitled Romantic Natural History. We often assume that Charles Darwin announced a new era in the scientific understanding of the natural world with the publication of his Origin of Species (1859). In fact, Darwin’s theory was the culmination of decades of speculation about connections between human beings and nonhuman “nature.” These ideas reflect not only in the work of natural scientists, philosophers, and theologians, but also the ideas of poets, novelists, and visual artists. Romantic Natural History surveys and organizes texts, images, and scholarship linking Romanticism and natural history in the period 1750-1859.

See: blogs.dickinson.edu/romnat