Theresa M. Kelley, \u3ci\u3e Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture. \u3c/i\u3e A Review by James C. McKusick

Book review by James C. McKusick. Truly encyclopedic in scope, Clandestine Marriage traces the efflorescence of botanical discourse in the long Romantic period, from the foundation of the Linnaean system of classification in Systema Naturae (1735) through the first publication of Charles Darwin\u27s Origin of Species (1859). Kelley offers a comprehensive historical view of botany as a distinct nexus of interaction between literature and science, showing how the characteristic certainties of Enlightenment science broke down under the pressure of newly-discovered plant specimens from distant parts of the world, new ways of understanding the taxonomic relationships among various plant species, and new modes of presenting botanical information within the epistemic framework of the philosophy of science

Steven E. Jones. \u3ci\u3eAgainst Technology: From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism\u3c/i\u3e.

A Review by James C. McKusick. In Against Technology: From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism, Steven E. Jones offers a cultural history of the Luddite movement and an account of how it was ultimately transformed into contemporary neo-Luddism. Against Technology highlights essential differences between the historical Luddite movement and modern neo-Luddism while still elucidating important continuities in the beliefs and attitudes of those who have stubbornly resisted the encroachment of technology into everyday life

Susan Manly. Language, Custom and Nation in the 1790s: Locke, Tooke, Wordsworth, Edgeworth

A Review by James C. McKusick. In Language, Custom and Nation in the 1790s, Susan Manly demonstrates how a populist and materialist philosophy of language contributed to the radical politics and poetics of the British Romantic period. The distinctive scholarly contribution of Language, Custom and Nation, in the 1790s is to show how a Lockean theory of language provided a conceptual framework for some of the most radical and transformative political ideas of the 1790s

Onno Oerlemans, \u3ci\u3eRomanticism and the Materiality of Nature\u3c/i\u3e

A Review by James C. McKusick. In Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature, Onno Oerlemans embarks upon an ambitious project to re-situate Romantic poetry in the hard, physical reality of the material world. This study endeavors to place several of the Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Shelley, within the larger intellectual and material contexts of their period, attending not only to the social and cultural currents that shape poetic discourse, but also to the concrete physical substrate of poetic production

Introduction: New Directions John Clare Studies

The John Clare Conference, organized by the John Clare Society of North America, March 21-22, 2003, was held at the Belmont Conference Center. The program explored new directions in Clare scholarship and celebrated the completion of the Oxford English Text edition of John Clare\u27s poetry

The Return of the Nightingale

In Ecological Literary Criticism (1994), Karl Kroeber advocated a bold new approach to the study of literature. More than just another routine method of textual analysis, ecological literary criticism seeks to bridge the gap between the natural sciences and the humanities. Such an approach incorporates theoretical advances in the science of environmental biology while it adapts to the changing social and political circumstances of contemporary criticism

\u3ci\u3eTravels, Explorations and Empires: Writings from the Era of Imperial Expansion, 1770-1835\u3c/i\u3e, ed. Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson, 4 vols (Pickering & Chatto Publishers, 2001).

A Review by James C. McKusick. Some of the best recent scholarship in our field has been concerned with the political and geographic contexts (and subtexts) of Romantic literature. In particular, several recent books have addressed the relationship between Romanticism as a literary field and the new economic, geographic, and social realities that emerged in consequence of British imperial expansion on a global scale. Two recent collections of essays are exemplary in the scope and sophistication of their approach to these new geopolitical realities: Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture (1996), edited by Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh, and Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire (1998), edited by Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson

The Politics of Language in Byron\u27s \u3ci\u3eThe Island\u3c/i\u3e

Byron\u27s late poem The Island: or, Christian and His Comrades (1823) has not proven especially congenial to modern sensibility; relatively little has been written about it, and most critics have tended to dismiss it as a regrettable episode in the Romantic idealization of the Noble Savage

Living Words : Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Genesis of the \u3ci\u3eOED\u3c/i\u3e

Today we are at a crucial moment in the evolution of the Oxford English Dictionary, as the dog-eared volumes are withdrawn from library shelves and replaced by the sleek second edition of 1989. This new OED bears witness to the continuing relevance and utility of the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles for the current generation of literary scholars. The event of its publication provides an opportunity for a fresh historical perspective on the circumstances surrounding the production of the original OED, which was published between 1884 and 1928 in a series of 125 fascicles and bound up into those thick volumes so familiar to students and teachers of English literature