French Naturalist Research Articles

Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture by Julie Olin-Ammentorp

Reviewed by: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture by Julie Olin-Ammentorp Emily Orlando Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture. By Julie Olin-Ammentorp. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. x + 386 pp. $60 cloth. Despite their status as major fixtures in the American literary canon, Edith Wharton (1862–1937) and Willa Cather (1873–1947) are rarely examined together. The last book-length study of the two appeared thirty years ago. As [End Page 185] Julie Olin-Ammentorp elucidates in her smart, eloquently written new book, the writers have been kept apart because they have been wrongly perceived as different. In one corner we find Edith the aristocratic chronicler of New York (a label overlooking her investment in other genres and demographics); in another sits Willa “the plainspoken pioneer” scribe of the Midwest (25). Olin-Ammentorp’s study accounts for what is lost by simplistically reading the writers as disparate and emphasizes the importance of place and the relationship between place and culture in their work. In so doing, the book illuminates the many meaningful ways the writers intersect. Indeed, as Olin-Ammentorp so ably teaches us, Cather, not Wharton, is the one who lived in New York for four decades, yet Wharton is remembered as the New Yorker. While Cather, in turn, has been mythologized as the prairie writer of Nebraska, “both authors lived for a relatively brief period in the places with which they are most associated” (10). This highly engaging new book examines fiction, life writings, and theories of art by the two Pulitzer Prize–winning honorary Yale degree recipients. Olin-Ammentorp reveals how they offer a similar criticism of dominant American culture as obsessed with money-making for its own sake and ill-equipped to appreciate anything beyond pure profit. Both writers emerge as exceedingly private Francophiles as deeply invested in culture and aesthetics as they were distrustful of modernism (26). They loved travel, gardens, and their homes and moved in the same circles. They shared influences like Henry James, Walter Pater, and the French naturalists and even a biographer. In the book’s rich, interdisciplinary context, we see Wharton and Cather anew. Olin-Ammentorp is ideally suited to this task. Her study brings together biographical and historical analysis with impeccable close reading, emphasizing place and aesthetics to document the writers’ surprisingly shared experience of dislocation, their connections to each other as writers, and the compelling links between their theories of fiction and their unacknowledged investment in the culture of place and the place of culture in the United States. The book “uses ‘culture’ to refer both to the ‘high’ culture Wharton and Cather valued and to ‘the ways distinct communities construct meanings’” (15). As Olin-Ammentorp explains: “Given Wharton’s and Cather’s concern with ‘the place of culture’ in American society, I chose to use that phrase in my title. But ‘the culture of place,’ the ways in which national or regional communities establish values, underlies ‘the place of culture’ and is equally a concern” (15). Laying the foundation for her study, Olin-Ammentorp draws on the critic Merrill McGuire Skaggs’s observation that “books talk to each other,” which in turn calls to mind Virginia Woolf ’s sense that books continue each other (2). Olin-Ammentorp certainly shows Wharton and Cather—whom the former once referred to as “the lady with the blurry name” (26)—to be engaged in a career-long conversation that has gone largely unrecognized. She identifies [End Page 186] this, for instance, in the first chapter’s discussion of the ways Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome mattered to Cather. In chapter 2, the book examines both writers’ quest to enter what they called “the Land of Letters” (Wharton) and “the kingdom of art” (Cather) (70). The third chapter, which begins the book’s section on the place of culture, examines New York City in Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Cather’s “Paul’s Case.” Chapter 4 considers the American West in such works as Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, Hudson River Bracketed, and The Gods Arrive and Cather’s The Song of the Lark. Chapter...

The Literary Code of Vincent van Gogh

The Literary Code of Vincent van Gogh Christa DiMarco (bio) Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him Mariella Guzzoni University of Chicago Press https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/V/bo51205258.html224 Pages; Print, $25.00 Vincent van Gogh’s reading practice is as legendary as his paintings. While he devoted his days to his canvases, at night he would “light the lamp and go on reading.” In his letters (of which we have over 800), he devoted many passages to discussing literature from Shakespeare to popular periodicals and modern novels. Reading Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Émile Zola as well as French historical studies by Jules Michelet, cultural criticism by Thomas Carlyle, and studying printed illustrations by Frédéric Montenard, Hubert von Herkomer, and George Cruikshank laid the thematic and stylistic foundation for his art. Van Gogh, for example, noted that he sympathized with Madame François and Florent, two working-class characters who attempt to navigate bourgeois Paris in Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris (1873). Prints that depicted those who lived on the economic or geographic margins likewise captured his attention. In a letter to the artist Anthon van Rappard, Van Gogh shared one of his important artistic influences: The Graphic, a British illustrated publication from which he saved prints to “form a kind of Bible for an artist, in which he reads now and again to get into a mood.” Among the many prints he mentioned, Van Gogh compared George John Pinwell’s The Sisters “to the full song of the nightingale on a spring night” and regularly touted the quality and the impact of the prints he came across. Both the novels he read and the prints he cherished conveyed the dignity of a humble life amid inescapable societal difficulties, a central theme he explored in the imagery of his short, ten-year painting career. Despite the fluency between the written word and painting, we seldom recognize the literary imprint that permeates Van Gogh’s oeuvre. Even art historians pay relatively scant attention to the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of his artistic approach. Cursory references to Van Gogh’s reading habits abound in biographical accounts and exhibition catalogs, and just two scholarly explorations come to mind: Judy Sund’s 1992 True to Temperament: Van Gogh and French Naturalist Literature and Wouter van der Veen’s 2009 Vincent van Gogh: A Literary Mind. Given that Van Gogh mentioned over two-hundred authors in his letters and read in Dutch, English, French, and German, surely there is more to explore. Mariella Guzzoni’s Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him offers newfound connections between Van Gogh’s paintings and his insatiable literary curiosity that will be of interest to Van Gogh enthusiasts and bibliophiles. Finding a worthwhile approach to Van Gogh’s large body of work — over 800 paintings and 1000 works on paper — requires a method as innovative as the paintings themselves. Guzzoni uses the extensive collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam as well as her own collection of the editions Van Gogh read and discussed in his letters. She leads readers chronologically through Van Gogh’s works without becoming entangled in the myriad facts of the painter’s biography, a temptation few authors navigate well. Instead, she explores specific references and stops to rest on telling exchanges between text and art that the book’s engaging layout complements. Vincent’s Books is a beautiful publication that pays homage to the art of the book. It is carefully structured, poignantly designed, and includes full-color matte reproductions of journal pages and book covers. Reproductions of the editions Van Gogh read appear throughout and Guzzoni also includes pictures of the books open to the passages she discusses so you can view the print in its original publication. These pictures appear alongside Van Gogh’s paintings, drawings, or letters and are often accompanied by germane quotations. Readers can pause on passages dedicated to reflecting on the interplay between text and image, an experience akin to spending time with a rare edition in an archive...

Jefferson Takes on Buffon: The Polemic on American Animals in <em>Notes on the State of Virginia</em>

In Query 6 of Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson’s only published book, he made a spirited argument against the theories of the leading French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, who believed the Americas had fewer species and smaller animals than in the Old World. Many historians and biographers have championed Jefferson’s patriotic defense of American nature, but few have recognized how closely Jefferson relied on Buffon even as he tried to refute his theories. This article examines the composition of NSV’s Query 6 based on the archived manuscript and notes held at the Massachusetts Historical Society, as well as the French translation published in Paris in 1786. It includes an annotated version of one of Jefferson’s several tables of American animals, cross-referencing it to sources in Buffon and to modern species names. Whereas many assume that Jefferson got the better of Buffon, in fact the latter’s evidence for a decline in the size of large quadruped species was accurate. Jefferson’s paper about an animal he called the megalonyx, which he read to the American Philosophical Society in 1797, revisited the debate, added high-quality engravings of fossil bones, and—because Jefferson argued that the mammoth and the megalonyx still lived in North America—reiterated his difficulties in taking on Buffon.

The representation of the American territory and the controversy between Jefferson and Buffon

The Franco-American confrontation of scientific reports on nature reveals that the Lewis and Clark Expedition was not so essentially a conquering move as previously asserted because it was conceived mostly within the context of a scientific survey with the aim to prove or disprove Buffon’s contention that the American climate was that of paradise (hot and humid), and that the absence of hardship fostered mediocrity if not degeneration. In his admiration for Buffon, Thomas Jefferson strove to bring his observations to the attention of the French naturalist, beginning with his own publication on Virginia botanical surroundings, and with his observations on large American animals that included the Mammoth, whom he thought still alive because of his respect for creationism. The fact that large animals were roaming the continent disproved that degeneration was the fate of its inhabitants, degeneration implying a diminutive size. As well, “Indians” were not any lesser than other human beings (since creationism excluded evolution one way or the other, and he saw no evidence of degeneracy in any kinds of beings from America). He did foresee that they might benefit from their adoption of British forms of governance and religion so that perhaps, in due time, they could establish their own “nations”.

Jorunn S. Gjerden, Kari Jegerstedt, and Željka Švrljuga, eds., Exploring the Black Venus Figure in Aesthetic Practices

Since the days of her infamous exhibition in early nineteenth-century London and Paris and her posthumous dissection at the hands of French naturalist Georges Cuvier, the story of Sarah Baartman returned to public attention in 1985 with the publication of two ground-breaking articles by Stephen Jay Gould and Sander L. Gilman, who both remarked that Baartman’s remains were still on display at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris. In 1994, newly elected President Nelson Mandela visited President Franc...

"Émile Zola and the Naturalistic School, or Realism in French Literature" by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, edited with an Introduction and Textual Notes.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon wrote an essay on the French Naturalist novelist, Émile Zola, in 1885 for the Fortnightly Review at the request of the editor, T.H.S. Escott. However, Braddon later withdrew from publication. This edition of the essay, with contextual introduction, a note on editorial principles and explanatory notes is the first publication of Braddon’s manuscript which otherwise remains accessible to scholars only in the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas.

El vuelo del Angelus Novus por los campos de refugiados de Tinduf. Cavilaciones benjaminianas

Walter Benjamin used to compare quotes with “waylayers” in the path of reading. In the present article, getting distant words out of context will set a constantly interrupted rhythm of writing, emulating the experience of hospitality among nomads. Thus, in an exercise of critical memory whose emblematic figure is the Benjaminian angel of history, we will evoke visits to the refugee camps in Western Sahara. Among Derridian figures of hospitality, authors from distant places such as the Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish, the Argentinian writer Juan José Saer, or the French naturalist Théodore Monod, among others, will be gathered in quotes in these pages that will keep on trying to explain the impossible Angelus Novus flight.

El registro geológico inédito de Bonpland sobre la turba malvinera

El presente trabajo se centró en la identificación y puesta en valor histórico de los registros geológicos, vinculados a las Islas Malvinas y Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, que enumera y describe en su Catálogo Geológico, individualizado como manuscrito MS 210, el naturalista francés Aimé Bonpland (1773-1858). Éstos fueron examinados por primera vez por esta investigación en el año 2018 durante un estudio sobre los Archivos Bonpland no digitalizados y depositados en el Museo Nacional de Historia Natural, París, Francia. Los registros mencionados tuvieron su origen en las muestras geológicas entregadas por el Sr. Luis Vernet (1791-1871), primer gobernador y comandante argentino de las Islas Malvinas, cuando ambos coincidieron con su presencia en Buenos Aires en el año 1832. Estas muestras fueron estudiadas, clasificadas e incorporadas al Catálogo de Geología General del Museo Nacional de Historia Natural de París, como Turba de color marrón de las Islas Malvinas, y Rocas de la Isla de los Estados, pertenecientes a la Colección Bonpland y como país de origen Argentina. Del mismo modo, se documenta el mencionado catálogo geológico, y se analizan las cartas de Bonpland a Humboldt de 1832, en orden al contexto e interés que las mismas representan para la historia de la República Argentina.

Paisajes y personajes del sur mexicano en la obra de Arthur Morelet: invitación a su lectura

In the genre designated "travel literature", which reflects the impressions that our country and its people raised in foreign visitors, the book by French naturalist Pierre Marie Arthur Morelet, Voyage dans L'Amerique Centrale, L'ile de Cuba et le Yucatan (Paris, 1857), certainly occupies a place of honor given the quality of his landscape descriptions, the sharpness of his observations on the socioeconomic situation of Southern Mexico, his significant reflections on culture (rooted in his encyclopedic training) and the excellence of his pen. This article is an invitation to read his work, in the light of its recent full publication in Spanish.

Paisajes y personajes del sur mexicano en la obra de Arthur Morelet: invitación a su lectura

In the genre designated "travel literature", which reflects the impressions that our country and its people raised in foreign visitors, the book by French naturalist Pierre Marie Arthur Morelet, Voyage dans L'Amerique Centrale, L'ile de Cuba et le Yucatan (Paris, 1857), certainly occupies a place of honor given the quality of his landscape descriptions, the sharpness of his observations on the socioeconomic situation of Southern Mexico, his significant reflections on culture (rooted in his encyclopedic training) and the excellence of his pen. This article is an invitation to read his work, in the light of its recent full publication in Spanish.

Jefferson Measures a Moose by Mara Rockliff

Reviewed by: Jefferson Measures a Moose by Mara Rockliff Deborah Stevenson, Editor Rockliff, Mara Jefferson Measures a Moose; illus. by S. D. Schindler. Candlewick, 2020 [48p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780763694104 $17.99 Reviewed from galleys R 6-9 yrs Founding Father Thomas Jefferson was, notably, a citizen scientist, who documented numbers of all kinds of weights, measures, and times. When famed French naturalist Buffon (fully, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon) claimed that everything in America (where he'd never been) was puny and weak, the nettled Jefferson amassed data into a book to prove him wrong. Buffon remained unimpressed by figures, so Jefferson determined to send him a moose. Unfortunately, the moose carcass arrived in France the worse for wear, but even more unfortunately, Buffon died without ever seeing it. On the fortunate side, Americans loved Jefferson's book, Notes on the State of Virginia. This takes a different tack from Clickard's Thomas Jefferson and the Mammoth Hunt (BCCB 12/18), focusing on Jefferson's Enlightenment-typical focus on data and using the moose mostly as an exemplar. Rockliff's well-paced, wryly funny narration is enjoyable as well as informative (if Buffon "believed in chirpless chickadees and puny pigs, then so would everybody else"). Schindler's familiar gravely humorous delicacy, in line and watercolor that sometimes echoes wood engraving with its hatching, is perfectly suited to the personable recounting of a polite historical feud. This would be a boon to early math classes or discussions about the importance of data, but it also serves as offbeat entertainment. Copious end matter expands on the story, provides answers to the questions Jefferson asks himself in the narrative, and includes lists of both primary and secondary sources. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Charles-Alexandre Lesueur in Philadelphia: His Remarkable Contributions to Natural History and Scientific Illustration

Here the nearly forgotten contributions of Charles-Alexandre Lesueur (1778-1846) to natural history during his stay in Philadelphia are reviewed. He was a self-taught artist and naturalist whose first occupation was that of an illustrator working for Nicolas Baudin, the commander of a Napoleonic expedition to explore the Austral regions in the early 1800’s. Through his work with the naturalist Francois Peron, both during and after the expedition, he became a reputed naturalist in his own right. Following the demise of Peron, Lesueur traveled to America in 1815 as an assistant for William MacLure, a geological explorer and philanthropist. Although his contract was for but two years, Lesueur resided in North America from 1816 to 1837. He first lived in Philadelphia, from 1816 to 1825, and there he made his critical contributions to the establishment of the one of the first and major societies of natural history in America and its journal, the Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. During this time, Lesueur published on a wide variety of taxa, created important contacts for the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia with renowned French naturalists, provided illustrations for other naturalists, and even aided in the printing of the journal. Although Lesueur is recognized as one of the key figures of science in 19th century America, his American scientific work is actually little known. This illustrated essay is an effort to shine a light on his neglected natural history work and his striking scientific illustrations from his time in Philadelphia.

ПОЭТИКА «РОМАНА О РОМАНЕ» ПАТРИКА МОДИАНО «ЧТОБЫ ТЫ НЕ ЗАБЛУДИЛСЯ В КВАРТАЛЕ»

The article analyzes the novel by the modern French writer Patrick Modiano So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood (‘Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier’, 2014) in terms of the genre poetics of the ‘novel about a novel’. The paper explains the use of the terms ‘novel about a novel’, ‘metanovel’, etc. in modern literary criticism. As part of research, there was studied the writer’s Nobel Lecture, read by him in the year of the novel’s publication, and the works of Modiano’s researchers from different countries. The conclusion is drawn about the game structure of the ‘novel about a novel’, which is architecturally connected with the French modernist tradition (M. Proust, A. Gide, and others). Throughout the novel, the herowriter Jean Daragane dreams of his own life, combining memories and imagination (the process of creative work, according to Modiano). Plunging into the past, Jean Daragane discovers in childhood a source of his loneliness (loneliness is a condition of the writer’s work and the theme of the ‘novel about a novel’). Recorded in a multitude of overlapping texts belonging to different genres (fake passport, business card, note book, phone book, article, letter, police report, dossier, brochure, novel, poems, etc.), the palimpsest novel creates a communicative space of dialogue, which is the only possible way out of loneliness for the writer. Inside the ‘self-begetting novel’ is the story of the creation of the hero’s first novel The Black Color of Summer (‘Le Noir de l'été’) as one of the intersecting storylines. Among the different intertextual references, Natural History by the French naturalist of the 18th century Buffon and the collection of poems by the eight-year-old girl Minou Drouet Tree, My Friend (‘Arbre, mon ami’) (1957) constitute the immediate context of the novel created in the process of reading and testify to its lyrical and philosophical character. Thus, Modiano’s work draws closer to the lyrical type of Proust’s ‘novel about a novel’, although the detective component and third-person narrative reveal the influence of A. Gide. The reference to the tradition of the modernist ‘novel about a novel’ emphasizes the author’s belonging to the ‘intermediate generation’ of writers who represent the difference between monumental novels of the past and fragmentary works of the present as self-reflection of the genre.

Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form by Christopher Laing Hill

Reviewed by: Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form by Christopher Laing Hill Patti Luedecke (bio) Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form, by Christopher Laing Hill. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020. Cloth, $99.95; Paper, $34.94; Ebook $34.95. While scholars of American literary naturalism acknowledge the precedent of French naturalists, especially Émile Zola, they also differentiate American naturalists from their French forebears. Christopher Laing Hill contributes to this distancing work in his comparative literature study of naturalism, Figures of the World, by arguing that literary “genealogy does not equal servility” (xx). Hill’s study uncouples naturalism from Zola as it expands the field by suggesting that the transnational history of naturalism is one of proliferation into naturalisms in the many parts of the world that adapted it, instead of adopting it wholesale after its inception in 1860s France. Hill’s first chapter charts the transnational “travels” of naturalism— a metaphor that Hill creates to avoid the concept of French naturalism having [End Page 257] a one-way impact or influence (13). Hill shows that naturalism as a method or a set of techniques, rather than a fixed form, lent itself to divergent ends across the planet: from anti-capitalism in the U.S. and Peru, to anti-colonialism in Korea. Hill rejects world literature criticism that would portray naturalism as radiating from a central French “‘Literary Mean Time’” with peripheral provinces lagging chronologically (15). Rather, Hill argues that what may appear to be false starts at naturalism in different parts of the world are, instead, proofs that writers retooled naturalism to suit literary conditions on the ground. For example, Hill demonstrates how naturalism in Brazil and Argentina mixed with both romanticism and realism, suggesting that these “seemingly strange hybrids of romantic naturalism and naturalistic modernism were not temporal aberrations, . . . but a common consequence of the travel of forms” (24). There was no direct route from romantic to realist, from naturalist to modernist texts, he says (27). Hill resists such an “evolutionary teleolog[y]” of genres by constructing an image of naturalism as a geographical field (48). Hill’s image of naturalism as a field is productively capacious. It allows us to imagine naturalism as thicker where thematic and formal trends were most utilized and as thinner where the plurality of naturalisms generated outlier elements no less integral to the field, if localized. Because Hill’s transnational definition of naturalism embraces amalgams and aberrations, I believe that it has the potential to provide scholars with new insights into naturalism’s defining contradictions: its simultaneous biological determinism and social reformism, its equal interest in untamed and urban environments, its elision of political economy with both nature and the monstrously unnatural, and its juxtaposition of meticulous documentary details with outsized metaphors. To attend to naturalism’s multifariousness, Hill advocates a method that foregrounds close reading (xv). While Hill developed this “inductive approach” (xvii) in response to the reductive methods of world literature criticism, it nonetheless mirrors Donald Pizer’s advice. Pizer urges readers of naturalism to attempt, not “to find a universal element in significantly different works but to read each work for what it expresses and then to build synthetic constructions” (Pizer 225). Hill coins three such synthetic constructions: the “body figure,” the “Nana figure,” and the “social figure” (xv). Hill’s attentive close readings trace how each of these figures was forged by Zola and formed by nineteenth-century French culture but recast by American and Japanese naturalist authors. By suggesting that these authors remolded these figures to critique their respective culture’s political [End Page 258] and literary authorities, Hill distances their works from both Zola and determinism. Hill examines how Zola created the “body figure” as a naturalist technique by employing contemporary medical models of the nerve as a housing for both physiological and psychological processes. The nerve’s mind-body bridge created a spillover that enabled “body figures” of all kinds to represent physical, behavioral, and, ultimately, social phenomena. For example, Hill reads Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877) as a competition between bodily synecdoches, with Gervaise’s arm symbolizing her hardworking behavior, which prevails for a time...

"La primera colección de datos estadí­sticos de toda la República". El cuestionario de Claudio Gay de 1841 y la producción de saber estatal en Chile republicano

En 1841, el naturalista francés Claudio Gay dirigió un cuestionario a todos los intendentes y gobernadores de la república de Chile solicitando información relativa al estado de las provincias y departamentos del paí­s. Esta encuesta reviste relevancia, porque fue una de las últimas acciones de alcance nacionalque Gay realizó como parte de las pesquisas que culminarí­an en la redacción de su monumental Historia fí­sica y polí­tica de Chile; pero también porque constituyó un antecedente importante –y relativamente desconocido– para el proceso de institucionalización de la estadí­stica chilena. Al analizar la estructura y contenido del cuestionario, así­ como algunos de los temas especí­ficos abordados en las respuestas departamentales, este artí­culo ofrece una evaluación de los factores cientí­ficos, polí­ticos e institucionales que determinaron los primeros esfuerzos de producción de saber estatal en el marco de la formación del Estado chileno.

The Shipwrecked Slaves of Tromelin Island: A Crime of Lese-Humanity

The account of the shipwreck of the French East India Company vessel, the Utile, in 1761 and the ordeal of the marooned slaves provide a specific perspective on the economics, geopolitics, science, ideology and ethics prevailing in the late 18th century. The background to the tragedy of the marooned slaves underlines the role and status of the ports of calls European trading companies occupied to ensure their safe passage to India, ranging from basic havens to settlements or factories. Their economic role on the trade routes was vital as a source of food and water crews needed to get fresh supplies and cure their sick. They were also politically essential and constituted a source of rivalry between the Dutch, Portuguese, English, and French. Ideologically, they reflected the relation with local populations and exploitation of natural resources — the demise of the dodo on Mauritius being a case in point, as well as the transplantation of precious spices to Mauritius by the French naturalist Poivre from the well-protected Dutch factories in Indonesia. Utopian schemes were sometimes enacted on these tiny islands picked randomly or used as safe havens after shipwrecks or again selected as spaces where societies would be born anew for new pilgrims and outcasts. A large body of literature, be it travel accounts, logbooks or fiction, emerged on those topics both in France and Britain foregrounding revolutionary ideas in 18th century Europe.

Le savon et la propreté dans la littérature du XIXe siècle

À travers l’étude du savon en tant qu’objet, nous souhaitons dans cet article aborder les tensions hygiéniques, sociales et littéraires qui caractérisent la toilette du corps au XIXe siècle. Nous proposons une contextualisation médicale et littéraire de cet objet résolument ancré dans le quotidien afin de le réintégrer dans un rite – celui de la toilette – et dans un discours qui lui confère une vie inséparable de celle de son possesseur. Grâce à une perspective de culture matérielle, il est possible de mettre en lumière un réseau de significations dissimulé sous ce détail que semble être cet objet dans la littérature. Le savon apparaît avant tout comme le vecteur de la vertu encore trop lié au quotidien des individus issus des basses classes. Cependant, paradoxalement peut-être compte tenu de la relation directe qu’il entretient avec le corps, il semblerait que le savon soit le grand absent des romans réalistes et naturalistes.

Strata of the state: Resource nationalism and vertical territory in Bolivia

This paper examines the relationship between resource nationalism, state territorialization, and geological knowledge production in Bolivia. Focusing on two historical moments of post-revolutionary state-building – post-Independence (1825) and post-National Revolution (1952) - I show how the subterranean was produced as vertical state territory not only in law but also through science. By charting this history, I argue that anti-Indigenous racism was historically built into resource nationalism through ongoing collaborations between earth scientists and various iterations of the Bolivian state. In the post-Independence era, French naturalist Alcide d’Orbigny was hired by the nascent Bolivian state to produce the country's first geological map. His writings, which ranged from the geological to the ethnological, conceptually grafted Indigenous peoples to the surface of the earth while representing the subterranean as empty save for natural resources. In the post-National Revolution era, d’Orbigny's work reemerged as influential when it was taken up by both political theorists and geologists. Through a close examination of works from these two eras, I show how the subsoil became the rationalized realm of the state. I further suggest that the contemporary tension between state-led resource extraction and Bolivia's “plurinational” constitution, which pluralizes the nation and ostensibly supports Indigenous autonomy, can be understood as a spatial tension between the subterranean, which is held in perpetuity by the state, and the surface, which can be owned privately or communally and imbued with place-specific meanings. Although resource nationalism might appear to be a progressive effort to redistribute resource wealth, capable of countering the neoliberal privatization of decades prior, such extractive projects threaten Indigenous territorial rights, compromising the purportedly decolonial goals of the Plurinational State.

The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America by Jennifer Van Horn

Reviewed by: The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America by Jennifer Van Horn Gabrielle M. Lanier (bio) The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America. By Jennifer Van Horn. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xvii, 428. $49.95 cloth; $34.95 paper; $29.99 ebook) Material goods mattered to the elite citizens of eighteenth-century British America. Jennifer Van Horn's book explores how material objects from portraits and dressing tables to gravestones and wooden legs allowed colonists to form aesthetic communities based on shared sensibilities and patronage networks, communicate their identities transatlantically, and develop a civil society. Van Horn draws from a broad range of sources including prints and paintings, artifacts, period documents, and literature. Elites in major colonial port cities "used things to refine themselves and, by so doing, created personas that enabled them to enter into the relationships with one another that constituted civil life. . . . Ultimately, elites' assemblages of artifacts enabled them to extend their local communities outward to forge a collective [End Page 99] identity as a nation of citizens" (pp. 9–10). Just as importantly, these elites were also anxious to distinguish themselves from "the threatening counterexamples provided by Native Americans and African Americans" (p. 21). Drawing her view of the nature and development of civil society from John Locke, Van Horn builds on previous studies of refinement, civil society, and savagery by David Shields, John L. Brooke, Homi Bhabha, Norbert Elias, and Richard Bushman. The book includes an introduction, six chapters, an epilogue, 130 illustrations, and ten plates. The first half of the book focuses on the aesthetic communities created in colonial ports around the mid-eighteenth century; the second half explores these aesthetic communities during the imperial crisis, the Revolution, and afterward. One of the strongest chapters examines the monumental prints of colonial port cities. Urban prospects glorifying the tamed and civilized colonial landscape were partly driven by notions of American inferiority, which were fueled by the frequently republished claims of French naturalist Comte de Buffon, who claimed that indigenous American species were smaller and weaker than their European counterparts due to a dearth of cleared land. Other chapters focus on the portraits that London-trained artist John Wollaston painted in Philadelphia; Charleston's portrait gravestones; images depicting masquerades; women's dressing furniture; and the wooden leg used by American statesman Gouverneur Morris. Van Horn argues that elites in colonial port cities redefined the role of representation to suit their own circumstances, and that Charleston's portrait gravestones helped the dead maintain politeness after they had passed. Later in the century, depictions of masquerades "simultaneously awakened and assuaged anxiety surrounding colonists' temporary suspension in their relationship with Great Britain," and dressing tables, along with tea tables and their equipage, "became part of a constellation of goods that women used to assert their political power in the eighteenth century" (pp. 28, 296). While The Power of Objects is provocative and engagingly written, the author occasionally stretches her evidence to fit her argument. [End Page 100] Gouverneur Morris's prosthesis resembled "a piece of wearable upholstered furniture" that helped camouflage his physical deformity, but it also allowed him to blend into the stylistically similar wooden furniture legs in refined Philadelphia parlors (p. 363). Similarly, the author asserts that the unknown cabinetmaker who crafted this turned wooden prosthesis made a conscious decision to visually connect Morris's artificial limb to high-style furniture, thereby demonstrating his status. More than likely, however, the leg was made by an artisan who simply drew upon the materials and techniques he was most familiar with: those used for making and upholstering furniture (pp. 360–61). Still, these are relatively minor issues in a deeply researched book that is full of wonderful surprises. On balance, Jennifer Van Horn's exploration of material goods in British America remains an important contribution to the literature dealing with the material world. Gabrielle M. Lanier GABRIELLE M. LANIER is professor and interim head of the department of history at James Madison University, where she also directs the public history program. She is the author of The Delaware Valley in the Early Republic: Architecture, Landscape, and Regional Identity (2005...

Global Scientific Practice in an Age of Revolutions, 1750–1850 ed. by Patrick Manning and Daniel Rood

theme of compromise in the face of need provides one way to look at German practice as a whole. However, with Kuss, as with discussion of the response to the Resistance during World War Two, so with Stoltzfus, it is necessary to consider the ideology at play and the extent to which there was a brutal and overriding determination to ensure control and remould society. In each case, this is apparent. Being exposed to a policy of tactical expedience was not probably the first thought of those being slaughtered or tortured. JEREMY BLACK University of Exeter Global Scientific Practice in an Age of Revolutions, 1750–1850. Edited by PATRICK MANNING and DANIEL ROOD. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. xii + 401 pp. $49.95 (hardcover). The past several decades witnessed a “global turn” in the field of history of science. The master narrative centering on the rise of modern science within Western Europe and its subsequent diffusion around the world is being increasingly effaced as more scholars joined in the search for a polycentric, inclusive framework for studying the “global histories” of science.1 The volume under review is a timely and welcome intervention in this rapidly growing discourse. Global Scientific Practice in an Age of Revolutions, published by the World History Center at the University of Pittsburgh as the inaugural volume in a planned series dedicated to starting a conversation between historians of science and scholars working in world/global/transnational history, invites all to contemplate seriously the possibility of a “world history of science.” The essays collected here were first presented in 2012 at the conference convened by the center titled “Linnaean Worlds: Global Scientific Practice during the Great Divergence.” The temporal focus, 1750 to 1850, is chosen because of the profound worldwide transformations taking place during this time in the realms of economy, 1 For some methodological explorations in this regard, see Lissa Roberts, “Situating Science in Global History: Local Exchanges and Networks of Circulation,” Itinerario 33 (2009): 9–30; the essays in Sujit Sivasundaram, et al., “Global Histories of Science,” Special Section of Isis 101 (2010): 95–158; and Fa-ti Fan, “The Global Turn in the History of Science,” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 6, no. 2 (2012): 249–258. 256 JOURNAL OF WORLD HISTORY, JUNE 2019 society, politics, and culture. Particularly, this period witnessed the “Great Divergence” in economic life between Europe and China that was observed by Pomeranz and others, at the same time when what came to be known as “modern science” gradually crystalized. The bulk of this science, the thematic focus of these essays, consisted of the bioand field sciences that take the earth, natural species, humans, and their immediate environs as their subjects. The diffusionist narrative about this science spotlights the works of great European minds such as Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc (Comte de Buffon, 1707–1788), and German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859). In contrast, contributors to this volume, through their richly documented case studies and bold yet judiciously enunciated syntheses, deconstruct that neat and heroic narrative by highlighting the multifarious origins of modern science in and outside Europe, its complex itineraries, its spontaneous, fragmentary, mobile, and incongruous nature, and its deep embedment in networks of power of varying scopes crisscrossing the (early) modern world. The book consists of five parts, preceded by an insightful introduction by Patrick Manning. Part I explores the dynamics of knowledge exchange in the Americas between Europeans and other local inhabitants. Matthew James Crawford’s study of the Spanish Crown’s failure in maintaining a royal reserve of quina (with the active ingredient quinine) in the Viceroyalty of New Granada in the 1790s reveals how the power of the empire was circumscribed by the way of knowing of their distant colonial subjects. Eleonora Rohland tells how early French settlers in Louisiana and other Europeans in North America struggled to comprehend the formation and patterns of hurricanes, and how the knowledge they gained through exchanges with Amerindians, inhabitants in the Caribbean, and Atlantic sailors helped them launch a meteorological discourse and eventually a largescale knowledge infrastructure for hurricane prediction spanning North...