A Natural History of the Novel: Species, Sense, Atmosphere
Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English Language and Literature
First Advisor
Kramnick, Jonathan
Abstract
How does literature make sense of the natural world? I argue that literary descriptions draw on and contribute to the methods of the natural sciences to help us generalize. From the natural world’s inexhaustible wealth of details, descriptions carve out the forms and abstractions that allow us to recognize particular individuals as instances of types. I offer a theory of description as a mode of thought rather than visualization, a mode that appeals to intuition rather than the eye. Such description by abstraction, I argue, manages to do more with less. The gestural, the laconic, and the vague can accommodate the endless variety that all too easily overwhelms the precise, detailed, and specific. Looking at works of natural history, antiquarianism, and meteorology, I trace three “rhetorics of generality”—species, sense, and atmosphere—that help us to conceptualize phenomena at vast scales, from the climate to the continuum of natural kinds. Read together, novelists and natural scientists show a joint effort to render the world through generalities and abstractions, to imply the elusive, and to make thinkable what we might not be able to see. I consider thinkers across the long eighteenth century, from Robert Boyle and John Locke, the Comte de Buffon and Carl Linnaeus, to the early-nineteenth-century meteorologist Luke Howard. The rise of the new sciences and colonial expansion across the period brought an influx of new natural forms, and natural scientists and novelists alike developed descriptive strategies to render an ever-expanding natural world. As a nascent literary genre, and one long associated with Lockean empiricism, the eighteenth-century novel, I argue, is the site of particularly dynamic theories of descriptive abstraction. I pair novelists with natural historians in order to illuminate their shared practices and theories of description of the natural world: John Ray’s “total aspect” and Daniel Defoe’s pared-down taxonomy; antiquarianism’s affective sensibilities and Thomas Amory’s felt theorems; Luke Howard’s cloud modifications and Ann Radcliffe’s shifting, slightly-differentiated landscapes. Contrary to accounts that take the novel’s detailed particularity for granted, I argue that novelists rendered these natural forms legible by abstracting them, offering lightly-sketched, sometimes vague, generalities. While critics such as Cynthia Wall have emphasized the descriptive detail’s ability to “make us see,” my project considers how description might “see” abstractly, recognizing the general shape of things at a glance. Description by abstraction renders the world eminently knowable and readily navigable, positing that, when it comes to natural forms, we know them when we see them. In bridging the distance between the literary and the scientific, I offer a pluralistic theory of form as an abstraction that makes legible things from plants and clouds to literary genres.
Recommended Citation
McGowan, Margaret Ann, "A Natural History of the Novel: Species, Sense, Atmosphere" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 946.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/946
