Subtitle: From John Bartram to William James
Author: Christoph Irmscher
Subject: Natural History/American Studies
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2615-9
Pages: 320 pp., 7x10, 64 b&w illus.
Description: A readable examination of the "daydreams" of early American naturalists from 1730 to 1868.

Winner of the Literature and Language Award, Association of American Publishers, Inc.1999, within the professional/scholarly division!

The Poetics of Natural History is about the daydreams of early American naturalists (from 1730 to 1868) and the collections they created around these dreams. Christoph Irmscher explores how, through the acts of organizing physical artifacts and reflecting upon their collections in writings and images, naturalists from John Bartram to Louis Agassiz were making sense of themselves and their world. These collections allowed them, in a way, to collect themselves.

In the first part of his book, Irmscher offers us a guided tour of the actual collections, beginning in Bartram's disorderly botanical garden in Philadelphia and taking us through the artful display of animals in Charles Willson Peale's collections, and, finally, to the "halls of humbug" of P. T. Barnum's American Museum. The second part of the book moves away from the collections, and explores representations of natural history in words and images. Irmscher unforgettably describes American collectors' fascination and horror with the rattlesnake, and invokes the violent and beautiful world of birds as described in John James Audubon's paintings and writings. His book ends with a description of Louis Agassiz's 1865 expedition to Brazil as seen through the eyes of the young William James, who reluctantly gathered Brazilian fish while his mentor assembled "proof" that some human beings were less human than others.

Christoph Irmscher is a lecturer on English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University, where he also teaches in the Program in History and Literature. He has published articles on American and Canadian literature and natural-history writing, as well as a book on modernist American poetry. He is editing Audubon's writings and drawings for the Library of America.

"This remarkable study revives a brilliant, exciting body of American writing-pre-Darwinian natural history-and makes it central to any understanding of American history and culture. The Poetics of Natural History is scholarly, tough, but at the same time a wonderful read, making the case for the art of natural-history writing, while recognizing that behind that art was intense, disturbing, often violent experience. This book will make a difference."

-George Levine, author, Darwin and the Novelists and Lifebirds

"The Poetics of Natural History is a learned and inventive study of natural history discourse in the 18th-and 19th-century United States, and will be of great interest to students of literary and cultural history, as well as historians of science and art." -Lawrence Buell, Harvard University