Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewThe collection ˝focuses on the actual tree, apprehended in its full materiality˝ in lieu of the metaphorical or symbolic treatment of trees, which sets it apart from earlier works of criticism on trees in the eighteenth century.
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ISLEThe plurality of the Enlightenment is a key organizing theme: the editors situate the volume within a growing literature that sees vitalism and sentiment in Enlightenment thought alongside detachment and classification.
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Environmental historyTable of ContentsLaura Auricchio, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook and Giulia Pacini, Introduction: invaluable trees
I. Arboreal lives
Hamish Graham, ‘Alone in the forest’? Trees, charcoal and charcoal burners in eighteenth-century France
J. L. Caradonna, Conservationism avant la lettre,? Public essay competitions on forestry and deforestation in eighteenth-century France
Paula Young Lee, Land, logs and liberty: the Revolutionary expansion of the Muséum d’histoire naturelle during the Terror
Peter Mcphee, ‘Cette anarchie dévastatrice’: the légende noire of the French Revolution
Paul Elliott, Erasmus Darwin’s trees
Giulia Pacini, At home with their trees: arboreal beings in the eighteenth-century French imaginary
II. Strategic trees
Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, The vocal stump: the politics of tree-felling in Swift’s ‘On cutting down the old thorn at Market Hill’
Michael Guenther, Tapping nature’s bounty: science and sugar maples in the age of improvement
Meredith Martin, Bourbon renewal at Rambouillet
Susan Taylor-Leduc, Assessing the value of fruit trees in the marquis de Fontanes’s poem Le Verger
Elizabeth Hyde, Arboreal negotiations, or William Livingston’s American perspective on the cultural politics of trees in the Atlantic world
Lisa Ford, The ‘naturalisation’ of François André Michaux’s North American sylva: patriotism in early American natural history
III. Arboreal enlightenments
Tom Williamson, The management of trees and woods in eighteenth-century England
Steven King, The healing tree
Nicolle Jordan, ‘I writ these lines on the body of the tree’: Jane Barker’s arboreal poetics
Waltraud Maierhofer, Goethe and forestry
Paula R. Backscheider, Disputed value: women and the trees they loved
Aaron S. Allen, ‘Fatto di Fiemme’: Stradivari’s violins and the musical trees of the Paneveggio
Summaries
Bibliography
Index
