“With confidence and precision, Bowden brings nineteenth-century scientific texts into vibrant focus. Radical Science will appeal to a growing community of scholars whose work explores the ecologies and environments of nineteenth-century British literature, science, and culture, thus speaking to our current climate crisis.” —Lynn Voskuil, author of Nineteenth-Century Energies: Literature, Technology, Culture
“Refreshing in its sophisticated approach to the relationship between literature and science, Radical Science is convincing and original, a deeply engaging and learned study that both specialists in the field as well as more general students of Victorian literature and culture will want to read.” —Amy King, author of The Divine in the Commonplace: Reverent Natural History and the Novel in Britain
Can plants move? Can they think? Can they act? In Radical Science, Mary Bowden shows that debates about plants’ capabilities are not new but can be traced to the nineteenth century, where they moved from scientific inquiries to popular articles and literary fiction. Examining the work of nineteenth-century physiological botanists, Bowden expands beyond Charles Darwin’s work in the field to uncover the full story of these debates and the impacts they had on literature, culture, and people. While many have interpreted the frequent comparisons between plants and people in nineteenth-century literature to be exemplative of aesthetic values or sexual symbolism, Bowden maintains that comparisons between plants and women, members of the working class, and people of color reiterate botanical debates about how to recognize agency in beings that are assumed to be passive. Studying the scientific texts of Darwin and Maria Elizabetha Jacson alongside social problem novels by Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Kingsley and early science fiction by H. G. Wells, Radical Science foregrounds the connection between science and literature and ultimately suggests that we look to the propositions of nineteenth-century physiological botany to find more sustaining models of social and environmental relationship.
Mary Bowden is Assistant Professor at the University of Delaware. Her articles have appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and Victorian Review.
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 Physiological Botany’s Radical Roots
Chapter 2 Plant-People in the Social Problem Novel
Chapter 3 Charles Darwin’s Radicle Science
Chapter 4 H. G. Wells’s Plantocenes
Conclusion Seeing Plants
Acknowledgments
Works Cited
Index
