Download or read book The Selborne Pioneer written by Ted Dadswell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gilbert White's name is known universally but, as Ted Dadswell insists in this book, important aspects of his work have frequently been overlooked even by scholarly editors. The Selborne naturalist (1720-1793) has been described as 'a prince of personal observers'; but a shrewd analytical questioning and comparing was also typical of his 'natural knowledge'. Exceptional even in his general aims, White studied the behaviour, the 'manners' and 'conversation', of his animals and plants. He saw, moreover, that an animal or plant and indeed a parish such as his own, was unitary in operation; again and again, a cause had numerous effects and an effect numerous causes. Observation could go forward in circumstances such as these, if one was both sharp-eyed and patient, but how could true investigation be managed? How could a particular cause or effect be isolated or tested? Here what Dadswell calls White's 'comparative habit' was put to good use. Gilbert White was a careful keeper of records, and using these comparatively he 'appealed to controls' while examining his living creatures. Questioning and testing even the 'entirely usual', White was brought back repeatedly to the notion of adaptability. His zoological findings often concerned 'changed or changing' animals (or birds) and their social and inter-personal relationships. Today, we can seem particularly well placed to appreciate his methods and factual claims; our 'ethologists' and ecologists have - seemingly - corroborated much of what he did. And yet just this corroboration renders him the more mysterious. To properly assess White as naturalist, we must be able to approach him not only scientifically but also historically. He hoped for the emergence of teams of behavioural workers but did not try to pre-empt what would be achieved only by such teams, and while he 'saw with his own eyes', as his friend John Mulso says, he was substantially affected by certain of his contemporaries and predecessors. His journals and notebooks show us the naturalist at work. When a perhaps unexpected combination of influences is allowed for, his 'unique' activities can be at least partially explained.
Download or read book The Selborne Pioneer written by Ted Dadswell and published by Centaur Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this re-examination of Gilbert White as naturalist and scientist, Ted Dadswell sets out to qualify the notion of White as an isolated figure, while also recognising what has been called his strange, perhaps unique, position as a forerunner.
Download or read book Modern British Nature Writing 1789 2020 written by Will Abberley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-17 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first full-length study of modern British nature writing is timely and invaluable for literary scholarship in the environmental crisis.
Download or read book Birds in Eighteenth Century Literature written by Brycchan Carey and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines literary representations of birds from across the world in anage of expanding European colonialism. It offers important new perspectives intothe ways birds populate and generate cultural meaning in a variety of literary andnon-literary genres from 1700–1840 as well as throughout a broad range ofecosystems and bioregions. It considers a wide range of authors, including someof the most celebrated figures in eighteenth-century literature such as John Gay,Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Anna Letitia Barbauld, William Cowper, MaryWollstonecraft, Thomas Bewick, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, andGilbert White. ignwogwog[p
Download or read book The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature 3 Volume Set written by Frederick Burwick and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-01-30 with total page 1767 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Romantic Literature is an authoritative three-volume reference work that covers British artistic, literary, and intellectual movements between 1780 and 1830, within the context of European, transatlantic and colonial historical and cultural interaction. Comprises over 275 entries ranging from 1,000 to 6,500 words arranged in A-Z format across three fully cross-referenced volumes Written by an international cast of leading and emerging scholars Entries explore genre development in prose, poetry, and drama of the Romantic period, key authors and their works, and key themes Also available online as part of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature, providing 24/7 access and powerful searching, browsing and cross-referencing capabilities
Download or read book The Submarine Pioneers written by Richard Compton-Hall and published by Periscope Publishing Ltd.. This book was released on 2003 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This witty and perceptive account of the early years of submarine development contains much new material and the lives of the forgotten pioneers of submarines. It includes many wonderful inventions and even more colourful inventors, but focuses primarily on John Philip Holland, the Irish-American genius who took submarine development out of the hands of lunatics and visionaries and turned it into a deadly weapon of war.
Download or read book Picturing Animals in Britain 1750 1850 written by Diana Donald and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From fine art paintings by such artists as Stubbs and Landseer to zoological illustrations and popular prints, a vast array of animal images was created in Britain during the century from 1750 to 1850. This highly original book investigates the rich meanings of these visual representations as well as the ways in which animals were actually used and abused. What Diana Donald discovers in this fascinating study is a deep and unresolved ambivalence that lies at the heart of human attitudes toward animals. The author brings to light dichotomies in human thinking about animals throughout this key period: awestruck with the beauty and spirit of wild animals, people nevertheless desired to capture and tame them; the belief that other species are inferior was firmly held, yet at the same time animals in stories and fables were given human attributes; though laws against animal cruelty were introduced, the overworking of horses and the allure of sport hunting persisted. Animals are central in cultural history, Donald concludes, and compelling questions about them--then and now--remain unanswered.
Download or read book Seeing England written by Charles Lancaster and published by The History Press. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the seventeenth century antiquarianism was a well-respected profession and antiquarian works were in demand, particularly amongst the gentry, who were especially interested in establishing lineage and the descent of land tenure. Although intended primarily as a source of information about who owned what and where, they often contained fascinating descriptions of the English landscape. Charles Lancaster has examined the town and county surveys of this period and selected the most interesting examples to illustrate the variety and richness of these depictions. Organised by region, he has provided detailed introductions to each excerpt. Including such writers as John Stow, William Dugdale, Elias Ashmole, Daniel Defoe, Gilbert White and Celia Fiennes, this is a book that will appeal to anyone with an interest in both national and local history and to lovers of English scenery.
Download or read book Ordering the World in the Eighteenth Century written by Frank O'Gorman and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-12-14 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Eighteenth century is often represented, applying Tom Paine's phrase, as 'The Age of Reason': an age when progressive ideals triumphed over autocracy and obscurantism, and when notions of order and balance shaped consciousness in every sphere of human knowledge. Yet the debates which surrounded the development of Eighteenth-century thought were always open to troubling doubts. Was nature itself truly an ordered entity, as Newton had argued, or was it a mass of chaotic, randomly moving atoms, as some materialist thinkers believed? This book explores the tensions and conflicts in these debates through a series of interdisciplinary essays from leading international scholars, each challenging the idea that the Eighteenth century was an age of order.
Download or read book Daybooks of Discovery written by Mary Ellen Bellanca and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rooted in a thriving culture of amateur natural history, the keeping of nature journals and diaries flourished in late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century Britain. As prescientific worldviews ceded to a more materialist outlook informed by an explosion of factual knowledge, lovers of nature both famous and obscure began to use daily composition as a quest for information about and a celebration of their surroundings. A central site of encounter, discovery, and expression, nature diaries took part in a vigorous cultural dialogue, performing, in an era called the "golden age" of nature writing, an engaging alchemy of language, science, and art. In Daybooks of Discovery: Nature Diaries in Britain, 1770-1870, Mary Ellen Bellanca offers the first critical study of this genre. In looking at the diaries of Gilbert White, Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Shore, George Eliot, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, as well as those of lesser-known figures, she explores the writers' pursuit of empirical knowledge of nature for its own sake, rather than focusing on Romantic nature philosophy or on 'ecology' as a metaphor for spiritual connectedness. Each chapter situates an individual author's journals amid contemporary discourses of natural history, examining how journal writing enabled and mediated the diarist's practice as naturalist. A mélange of fact, narrative, and imaginative re-creation, the nature diary played a crucial role in literature and science in a period of burgeoning knowledge about the natural world. For students and scholars of environmental history, the history of science, ecocriticism, and Victorian studies, Daybooks of Discovery will prove an essential tool for understanding this distinct genre.
Download or read book Birds and Us written by Tim Birkhead and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-09 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From award-winning author and ornithologist Tim Birkhead, a sweeping history of the long and close relationship between birds and humans Since the dawn of human history, birds have stirred our imagination, inspiring and challenging our ideas about science, faith, art, and philosophy. We have worshipped birds as gods, hunted them for sustenance, adorned ourselves with their feathers, studied their wings to engineer flight, and, more recently, attempted to protect them. In Birds and Us, award-winning writer and ornithologist Tim Birkhead takes us on a dazzling epic journey through our mutual history with birds, from the ibises mummified and deified by Ancient Egyptians to the Renaissance fascination with woodpecker anatomy—and from the Victorian obsession with egg collecting to today’s fight to save endangered species and restore their habitats. Spanning continents and millennia, Birds and Us chronicles the beginnings of a written history of birds in ancient Greece and Rome, the obsession with falconry in the Middle Ages, and the development of ornithological science. Moving to the twentieth century, the book tells the story of the emergence of birdwatching and the field study of birds, and how they triggered an extraordinary flowering of knowledge and empathy for birds, eventually leading to today’s massive worldwide interest in birds—and the realization of the urgent need to save them. Weaving in stories from Birkhead’s life as scientist, including far-flung expeditions to wondrous Neolithic caves in Spain and the bustling guillemot colonies of the Faroe Islands, this rich and fascinating book is an unforgettable account of how birds have shaped us, and how we have shaped them.
Download or read book Parish and Belonging written by K. D. M. Snell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-11-16 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What role did the parish play in people's lives in England and Wales between 1700 and the mid-twentieth century? By comparison with globalisation and its dislocating effects, the book stresses how important parochial belonging once was. Professor Snell discusses themes such as settlement law and practice, marriage patterns, cultures of local xenophobia, the continuance of out-door relief in people's own parishes under the new poor law, the many new parishes of the period and their effects upon people's local attachments. The book highlights the continuing vitality of the parish as a unit in people's lives, and the administration associated with it. It employs a variety of historical methods, and makes important contributions to the history of welfare, community identity and belonging. It is highly relevant to the modern themes of globalisation, de-localisation, and the decline of community, helping to set such changes and their consequences into local historical perspective.
Download or read book Swallow written by Angela Turner and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2015-11-15 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Known as heralds of spring and beautiful, elegant flyers, swallows are among the most beloved of familiar birds. Because they return with the spring, swallows, as Angela Turner explains, have long been associated with the renewal of life, love, fidelity, and fertility, while their ability to travel incredible distances has given them associations with freedom and speed. That freedom, however, hasn’t kept them from becoming familiar figures in towns and cities. They often seem to even seek out human company—for example, barn swallows are known for nesting in our buildings and purple martins in our back yards. Destruction of their natural habitat, however, has proved dangerous to some species of swallow, and recent years have seen some populations dwindling to the point of near-extinction. Turner outlines the reasons for these declines as part of her engaging account of the natural and cultural history of this beloved bird.
Download or read book Medicine Madness and Social History written by R. Bivins and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-06-15 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in honour of eminent historian Roy Porter by twenty of his colleagues and students, the collection renders cutting edge scholarship accessible. Historians from the three fields that Porter made his own - the histories of medicine, madness, and the Enlightenment - illustrate his influence while tackling major themes ranging from disability rights to the popularization of science. In their accounts, artisan gardeners jostle with anarchists, dentists, and hypnotists in a lively, and very Porterian, parade.
Download or read book Natures in Translation written by Alan Bewell and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2017-01-02 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Understanding the dynamics of British colonialism and the enormous ecological transformations that took place through the mobilization and globalized management of natures. For many critics, Romanticism is synonymous with nature writing, for representations of the natural world appear during this period with a freshness, concreteness, depth, and intensity that have rarely been equaled. Why did nature matter so much to writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? And how did it play such an important role in their understanding of themselves and the world? In Natures in Translation, Alan Bewell argues that there is no Nature in the singular, only natures that have undergone transformation through time and across space. He examines how writers—as disparate as Erasmus and Charles Darwin, Joseph Banks, Gilbert White, William Bartram, William Wordsworth, John Clare, and Mary Shelley—understood a world in which natures were traveling and resettling the globe like never before. Bewell presents British natural history as a translational activity aimed at globalizing local natures by making them mobile, exchangeable, comparable, and representable. Bewell explores how colonial writers, in the period leading up to the formulation of evolutionary theory, responded to a world in which new natures were coming into being while others disappeared. For some of these writers, colonial natural history held the promise of ushering in a “cosmopolitan” nature in which every species, through trade and exchange, might become a true “citizen of the world.” Others struggled with the question of how to live after the natures they depended upon were gone. Ultimately, Natures in Translation demonstrates that—far from being separate from the dominant concerns of British imperial culture—nature was integrally bound up with the business of empire.
Download or read book Deep Things Out of Darkness written by John G. T. Anderson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Natural history, the deliberate observation of the environment, is arguably the oldest science. From purely practical beginnings as a way of finding food and shelter, natural history evolved into the holistic, systematic study of plants, animals, and the landscape. This book chronicles the rise, decline, and ultimate revival of natural history within the realms of science and public discourse. It charts the journey of the naturalist's endeavour from prehistory to the present, underscoring the need for natural history in an era of dynamic environmental change.
Download or read book Regionalizing Science written by Simon Naylor and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian England, as is well known, produced an enormous amount of scientific endeavour, but what has previously been overlooked is the important role of geography on these developments. Naylor seeks to rectify this imbalance by presenting a historical geography of regional science. Taking an in-depth look at the county of Cornwall, questions on how science affected provincial Victorian society, how it changed people's relationship with the landscape and how it shaped society are applied to the Cornish case study, allowing a depth and texture of analysis denied to more general scientific overviews of the period.
