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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Reverent Induction: Epistemology And The Romantic Education Of The Child Reader In Charles Kingsley’S The Water-Babies (1863), Laura H. Clarke
Reverent Induction: Epistemology And The Romantic Education Of The Child Reader In Charles Kingsley’S The Water-Babies (1863), Laura H. Clarke
Publications and Research
In his essays and fiction for children, Kingsley champions inductive reason, the process of making generalizations from specific observations, and criticizes deductive reason, the process of arriving at definite conclusions on the basis of general theories. For Kingsley, in deriving a general axiom from a concrete observation—the unknown out of the known—the process of inductive reasoning requires a leap of faith that cannot be reduced to logical formulations. Like the Romantics, Kingsley believed that the wonder and imagination of childhood were essential for fostering what he called ‘reverent induction’—the ability to see in each process of inductive reasoning the unfolding …
Elizabeth Kent’S New Tales Of Botanical Friendship, Leila Walker
Elizabeth Kent’S New Tales Of Botanical Friendship, Leila Walker
Publications and Research
Elizabeth Kent has been considered a rather minor figure in the Leigh Hunt circle. However, this examination of her previously unknown children’s tales illuminates how Kent’s generic crossings establish a common emphasis on observation in the realms of botany, pedagogy, and poetry while suggesting that what happens beyond the observable world might be equally generative. Taken as a whole, Kent’s work constitutes a previously unacknowledged challenge to the Cockney School’s almost fetishistic attachment to the social. The identification of New Tales brings into focus Kent’s efforts to systematize friendship through her writing and clarifies her ambiguous response to Cockney amiability.
Sensitive Plants And Senseless Weeds: Plants, Consciousness, And Elizabeth Kent, Leila Walker
Sensitive Plants And Senseless Weeds: Plants, Consciousness, And Elizabeth Kent, Leila Walker
Publications and Research
When a team of researchers in 2018 found that plants exposed to anesthesia appeared to lose consciousness, the press reported that plants might have a consciousness to lose. The ensuing debate revealed a gap between scientific and literary approaches to human and nonhuman consciousness that this article traces back to the botanical writing of the Romantic period. These concerns, I argue, are central to Elizabeth Kent’s Flora Domestica (1823) and Sylvan Sketches (1825), both botanical works that double as literary anthologies in order to expose a productive gap between literary and scientific knowledge. In a time when the distinction between …