Planting a new world: letters and languages of transatlantic botanical exchange, 1733-1777

My dissertation describes an important change in the accepted understanding and imagination of nature. This change took place over the course of the eighteenth century, when nature, from being conceived of as a settled state subject to cyclical change, came to be seen as mobile and mutable. The sense of a mobile, mutable nature--the dissertation's central trope--arose from the experience of travel and discovery, which was accompanied from the first by a vigorous process of transplantation. Plants and seeds were carried across oceans, having been dug up on one continent to be replanted often in another. From being static and predictable, plant life therefore became, for scholars and poets alike, dynamic, mutable, and adaptable. I focus on the writings of a small group of men in the Anglo-American world, including John and William Bartram, Peter Collinson, Alexander Garden, John Ellis, and Carl Linnaeus, who were engaged in the work of transporting, planting, writing about, and classifying botanical objects. All were men of science (by inclination if not profession) and men of letters, and it is in their actual letters--their epistolary exchanges--that the transformation emerges most clearly. Indeed, letters nurtured the rhetorical and conceptual work of natural history in the Enlightenment, and thus provide the clearest expression and reflection of the cultural changes in the idea of nature itself. The mobility of botanical objects opened up new imaginative, rhetorical, organizational, and material possibilities for the individuals I discuss in this dissertation. Through their letters and related natural history writings, I trace the paradox by which nature came to be seen as the embodiment of change, even as it was being categorized and classified in new ways.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical references