Botanical Entanglements

To this day, women face barriers in entering scientific professions, and in earlier eras the challenges were greater still. But in Botanical Entanglements, Anna Sagal reveals how women’s active participation in scientific discourses of the eighteenth century was enabled by the manipulation of social and cultural conventions that have typically been understood as limiting factors. By taking advantage of the intersections between domesticity, femininity, and nature, the writers and artists studied here laid claim to a specific authority on naturalist subjects, ranging from botany to entomology to natural history more broadly. Botanical Entanglements pairs studies of well-known authors—Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, Maria Edgeworth, and Charlotte Smith—with authors and artists who receive less attention in this context—Priscilla Wakefield, Maria Jacson, Elizabeth Blackwell, Henrietta Maria Moriarty, and Mary Delany—to offer a nuanced portrait of the diverse strategies women employed to engage in scientific labor. Using socially acceptable forms of textual production, including popular periodicals, didactic texts, novels, illustrated works, craftwork, and poetry, these women advocated for more substantive and meaningful engagement with the natural world. In parallel, the book also illuminates the emotional and physical intimacies between women, plants, and insects to reveal an early precursor to twenty-first-century theorizing of plant intelligence and human-plant relationships. Recognizing such literary and artistic "entanglement" facilitates a more profound understanding of the multifaceted relationship between women and the natural world in eighteenth-century England.

Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics establishes the central importance of plants to the histories and cultures of the extended tropical region stretching from the U.S. South to Argentina. Through close examination of a number of significant plants – cacao, mate, agave, the hevea brasilensis, kudzu, the breadfruit, soy, and the ceiba pentandra, among others – this volume shows that vegetal life has played a fundamental role in shaping societies and in formulating cultural and environmental imaginaries in and beyond the region. Drawing on a wide range of cultural traditions and forms across literature, popular music, art, and film, the essays included in this volume transcend regional and linguistic boundaries to bring together multiple plant-centred histories or ‘understories’ – narratives that until now have been marginalized or gone unnoticed. Attending not only to the significant influence of humans on plants, but also of plants on humans, this book offers new understandings of how colonization, globalization, and power were, and continue to be, imbricated with nature in the American tropics.

Within key texts of Romantic-era aesthetics, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, and other writers and theorists pointed to the poet, naturalist, and physician Erasmus Darwin as exemplifying a lack of originality and sensibility in the period’s scientific literature--the very qualities that such literature had actually sought to achieve. The success of this strawman tactic in establishing Romantic-era principles resulted in the historical devaluation of numerous other, especially female, imaginative authors, creating misunderstandings about the aesthetic intentions of the period’s scientific literature that continue to hinder and mislead scholars even today. Regenerating Romanticism demonstrates that such strategies enabled some literary critics and arbiters of Romantic-era aesthetics to portray literature and science as locked in competition with one another while also establishing standards for the literary canon that mirrored developing ideas of scientific or biological sexism and racism. With this groundbreaking study, Melissa Bailes renovates understandings of sensibility and its importance to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century movement of scientific literature within genres such as poetry, novels, travel writing, children’s literature, and literary criticism that obviously and technically engage with the natural sciences.

This volume makes an important contribution to the understanding of translation theory and practice in the Early Modern period, focusing on the translation of knowledge, literature and travel writing, and examining discussions about the role of women and office of interpreter. Over the course of the Early Modern period, there was a dramatic shift in the way that translation was conceptualised, a change that would have repercussions far beyond the world of letters. At the beginning of the period, translation was largely indistinguishable from other textual operations such as exegesis, glossing, paraphrase, commentary, or compilation, and theorists did not yet think in terms of the binaries that would come to characterise modern translation theory. Just how and when this shift occurred in actual translation practice is one of the topics explored in this volume through a series of case studies offering snapshots of translational activity in different times and places. Overall, the picture that emerges is of a translational practice that is still very flexible, as source texts are creatively appropriated for new purposes, whether pragmatic, pedagogical, or diversional, across a range of genres, from science and philosophy to literature, travel writing and language teaching. This book will be of value to those interested in Early Modern history, linguistics, and translation studies.

With its laser-focus on the verbal and visual infrastructure of narrative, The Metanarrative Hall of Mirrors is the first sustained comparative study of how image patterns are tracked in prose and cinema. In film examples ranging from Citizen Kane through Apocalypse Now to Blade Runner 2049, then on to Christopher Nolan's 2020 Tenet, Garrett Stewart follows the shift from celluloid to digital cinema through various narrative manifestations of the image, from freeze-frames to computer-generated special effects. By bringing cinema alongside literature, Stewart discovers a common tendency in contemporary storytelling, in both prose and visual narrative, from the ongoing trend of “mind-game” films to the often puzzling narrative eccentricities of such different writers as Nicholson Baker and Richard Powers-including the latter's eerie mirroring of reader empathy in his 2021 Bewilderment.

In eighteenth-century Britain the worlds of literature and medicine were closely intertwined, and a diverse group of people participated in the circulation of medical knowledge. In this pre-professionalized milieu, several women writers made important contributions by describing a range of common yet often devastating illnesses. In Reimagining Illness Heather Meek reads works by six major eighteenth-century women writers – Jane Barker, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Frances Burney – alongside contemporaneous medical texts to explore conditions such as hysteria, melancholy, smallpox, maternity, consumption, and breast cancer. In novels, poems, letters, and journals, these writers drew on their learning and literary skill as they engaged with and revised male-dominated medical discourse. Their works provide insight into the experience of suffering and interrogate accepted theories of women’s bodies and minds. In ways relevant both then and now, these women demonstrate how illness might be at once a bodily condition and a malleable construct full of ideological meaning and imaginative possibility. Reimagining Illness offers a new account of the vital period in medico-literary history between 1660 and 1815, revealing how the works of women writers not only represented the medicine of their time but also contributed meaningfully to its developments.

Fantomina, or, Love in a Maze is a novella by Eliza Haywood which charts an unnamed female protagonist’s pursuit of the charming, shallow Beauplaisir. Dealing with major themes such as identity, class and sexual desire, and first published in 1725, Fantomina subverts the popular ‘persecuted maiden’ narrative, and reaches a climax which would have shocked its contemporary readership. Moving to London, a young woman – let’s call her Fantomina – meets a dashing man at the theatre. After a short, but intense, fling, Beauplaisir grows bored of Fantomina, and leaves her. Outraged that she should be so treated, Fantomina discards her disguise in favour of another, and sets off in hot pursuit of her victim, and a game of cat and mouse begins. This edition features an introduction by Dr Sarah R. Creel, Bethany E. Qualls and Dr Anna K. Sagal of the International Eliza Haywood Society. '[It] is right to deplore “Haywood’s invisibility to modern political historians”, but now we see her in focus, she matters for the imaginative power of her writing.' — Thomas Keymer, London Review of Books 'Haywood’s place in literary history is equally remarkable and as neglected, misunderstood and misrepresented as her oeuvre.' — Paula R. Backscheider

The return, after a three-year absence, of Sheriff Arly Hanks and the strange, misbegotten town of Maggody, Arkansas. Arly is facing a complicated murder investigation for which darned near everyone in town is a suspect.