The Rhetoric of Natural History and Philip Henry Gosse

The objective of this thesis is to re-contextualize the genre of natural history writing along with rhetorical theory to delineate an argument for examining the rhetoric of natural history as a method for exploring the spatial, symbolic, and ecological relationships between collected specimens and their cultural, historical, and political moments in the greater canon of knowledge of the natural world. I am using a history of science approach to conduct interdisciplinary research of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century natural history as an early form of science writing in order to better understand how science is made and the conditions under which facts are constructed. By examining the rhetoric of the artificial systems created by naturalists to name and categorize nature, I will include a brief look at the ontology of racial identity in the North American South as a consequence of the application of these artificial systems to social theory.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Author dc:creator

• Henderson, Anna

Contributors dc:contributor

• Jones, Rebecca E.
• Hunter, Rik; Palmer, Heather
• College of Arts and Sciences

• Natural history in literature
• Rhetoric
• Science in literature
• Gosse, Philip Henry, 1810-1888. Letters from Alabama -- Criticism and interpretation

Licence

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language

English, eng

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholar.utc.edu/theses/689

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholar.utc.edu:theses-1848