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This book explains how we came to think of the climate as something abstract and remote rather than a force that actively shapes our existence. It shows how the writings of American travellers in the Caribbean registered and pushed forward a new understanding of the climate in a pivotal period in modern history, roughly between 1770 and 1860.
List of contents
- Prologue
- The Man from the Tropics
- Introduction
- The Pathogenesis of the Modern Climate
- 1: The Climatic Regime
- 2: Astonishing Contrasts in J. Hector St. John de Crèvecur's Caribbean Sketches
- 3: Avenging Climes in Fictions of the Haitian Revolution
- 4: Picturesque Sensibility in William Cullen Bryant's American Tropics
- 5: Mysterious Connections: Climatic Influence in Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody
- 6: Man "in the Aggregate": Ralph Waldo Emerson and James McCune Smith
- Coda
- The End of Climate
- References
About the author
Michael Boyden is Chair Professor of English at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands, where he has worked since 2021. Prior to his appointment at Radboud University he was an associate professor of American literature at Uppsala University, Sweden, and, before that, an assistant professor at Ghent University, Belgium. He obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Leuven, Belgium, in 2006. He has been a Fulbright scholar at Harvard University and held visiting positions at Dartmouth College and Brigham Young University.
Summary
This book explains how we came to think of the climate as something abstract and remote rather than a force that actively shapes our existence. It shows how the writings of American travellers in the Caribbean registered and pushed forward a new understanding of the climate in a pivotal period in modern history, roughly between 1770 and 1860.
Additional text
Theoretically rigorous and rich with textual analysis, Climate and the Picturesque in the American Tropics asks us to fundamentally reassess the way we talk about climate. Indeed, the book shows that this seemingly free-floating, neutral concept is steeped in a lesser-known colonial history.
