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In the mid-eighteenth century, many British authors and literary critics anxiously claimed that poetry was in crisis. These writers complained that modern poets plagiarized classical authors as well as one another, asserted that no new subjects for verse remained, and feared poetry's complete exhaustion. Questioning Nature explores how major women writers of the era – including Mary Shelley, Anna Barbauld, and Charlotte Smith – turned in response to developing disciplines of natural history such as botany, zoology, and geology.
Recognizing the sociological implications of inquiries in the natural sciences, these authors renovated notions of originality through natural history while engaging with questions of the day. Classifications, hierarchies, and definitions inherent in natural history were appropriated into discussions of gender, race, and nation. Further, their concerns with authorship, authority, and novelty led them to experiment with textual hybridities and collaborative modes of originality that competed with conventional ideas of solitary genius.
Exploring these authors and their work, Questioning Nature explains how these women writers' imaginative scientific writing unveiled a new genealogy for Romantic originality, both shaping the literary canon and ultimately leading to their exclusion from it.
Melissa Bailes is Assistant Professor of English at Tulane University.
"Both erudite and engaging, this book makes a significant contribution to the study of originality in the period. I do not know of another study that connects this concept so ingeniously to scientific literature and issues of gender. An impressive contribution to the study of women writers of the period, to concepts of originality, and to the intersections of these categories and scientific literature."
– Judith W. Page, University of Florida, coauthor of Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England's Disciples of Flora, 1780-1870
"By foregrounding gender and originality as drivers of cultural production, Bailes reveals the true extent of the common ground shared by literature and science in the period. Questioning Nature offers the richest account available of women's science writing in the Romantic period."
– Noah Heringman, University of Missouri, author of Sciences of Antiquity: Romantic Antiquarianism, Natural History, and Knowledge Work
"With Questioning Nature we finally have a book that provides an in-depth, detailed, and knowledgeable account of the central role that natural history played in women's writing during the Romantic period. In eminently readable prose, Melissa Bailes demonstrates that women writers at this time were active participants in the culture of natural history and shows the diverse ways in which it guided their thinking ab out authorial identity and literary form, originality, and literary practice, including criticism and interpretation, collaboration, and translation. For anyone interested in the relationship between literature, gender, and scientific culture between 1750 and 1830, this is a must-read book."
– Alan Bewell, University of Toronto, author of Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History
"Bailes's competent and detailed account of women's controversial participation in the scientific debate between 1750 and 1830 offers a very original perspective from which to reconsider the issues of originality, gender and natural history, and, in a more general way, it also signals the necessity of a reconfiguration of the interrelation between literature and science in light of women's strong contribution to the field."
– Britist Society for Literature and Science
