| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Poetics of Natural History: From John Bartram to William James. By Christoph Irmscher. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999. xx, 354 pp. $42.00, isbn 0-8135-2615-9.)

In increasing numbers, historians whose interests range widely (from art and literature to the environment and science) have turned their scholarly gaze to the once-pervasive practices of collecting, describing, illustrating, and exhibiting natural history specimens. This particular volume, which takes its inspiration from Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space (1964), provides additional evidence of this trend. Written primarily from a literary historian's perspective, the book consists of six loosely connected essays that pursue the "aesthetic aspects of American natural history" from the end of the eighteenth century to the Darwinian era. With copious illustrations, sparkling prose, and a marvelous eye for detail, Christoph Irmscher attempts to unite his diverse subject matter through a single overarching (if not always completely fleshed out) theme: "how, in American natural history collection, things human and things natural were, if only briefly, allowed to coincide." . . .

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