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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
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 …
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.
Gathering Sense From Song: Robert Browning And The Romantic Epistemology Of Music, Laura Clarke
Gathering Sense From Song: Robert Browning And The Romantic Epistemology Of Music, Laura Clarke
Publications and Research
No abstract provided.
Purloined Voices: Edgar Allan Poe Reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alexander M. Schlutz
Purloined Voices: Edgar Allan Poe Reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alexander M. Schlutz
Publications and Research
This essay unfolds the complex intertextual relationship between the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and that of Edgar Allan Poe. References to and extended borrowings from Coleridge’s poetry and philosophical texts mark Poe’s œuvre throughout, but – as is only fitting for borrowings from the great borrower Coleridge – they are never anything as simple as plagiarisms or acts of intellectual theft. As this piece demonstrates through readings of Poe’s early poetological text “Letter to B–,” the Dupin story “The Purloined Letter,” and the late tour-de-force prose-poem Eureka, tracing the recurrence of Coleridgean poetry and prose in the work …
Two Kinds Of Utility: England’S ‘Supremacy’ And The Quest For Completion In David Dabydeen’S The Intended, Kevin Frank
Two Kinds Of Utility: England’S ‘Supremacy’ And The Quest For Completion In David Dabydeen’S The Intended, Kevin Frank
Publications and Research
This essay concerns the Caribbean writer’s crucial confrontation with colonial literary models. In it, Kevin Frank argues that the central protagonist of David Dabydeen’s The Intended, the unnamed narrator, resembles the author in that he is torn between cultures (English, East Indian, and West Indian), and torn between two kinds of utility: one base, mechanical, and calculating, and the other, romantic. The latter predicament, Frank demonstrates, is a natural consequence of the convergence of romantic and utilitarian ideology underpinning British colonialism. Moreover, Dabydeen’s ambivalence about his allegiances and literary heritage is similar to that of one of his literary …
Emma And The Countryside: Weather And A Place For A Walk, Elizabeth Toohey
Emma And The Countryside: Weather And A Place For A Walk, Elizabeth Toohey
Publications and Research
Raymond Williams in The Country and the City dismisses Jane Austen's depiction of the land around her as simply "weather or a place for a walk." In Emma's ideology, however, there is a tension between an ostensibly apolitical stance, which is de facto conservative in working to maintain the status quo, and the extent to which a more progressive agenda can be seen through the social mobility of certain principle characters, albeit by "conservative means." For all the leisure, picnics, and parties that constitute the greater part of Emma, labor is evident and valued. The country may be largely …