Abstract
Numerous encounters of sense perception and materiality, which decenter the human and open up experience to radical alterity, permeate Romantic-era texts. Through various encounters with the nonhuman, Anna Letitia Barbauld, Mary Robinson, and Charlotte Smith take the human out of isolation and speculate on why it wasn’t always already embedded in an ecological continuum of existence. Their poetry reveals a sensitivity to the limits of humanism by investigating uncanny entanglements with nonhuman beings. These encounters invoke a pre-reflective engagement with the world. Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment and posthumanist understandings of ecomaterialism, this essay explores the “strange kinship” between the human poet and nonhuman poetic subject. Barbauld, Robinson, and Smith critique dichotomous rationale, deconstruct species supremacy, and challenge human essentialism. By invoking the primacy of embodiment, these Romantic-era women writers offer shared corporeal investigations that move toward a posthuman ethos.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
For Braidotti, zoe is the mindless vitality of life carrying on, everywhere. Braidotti writes, “for me there is a necessary link between critical posthumanism and the move beyond anthropocentrism. I refer to this move as expanding the notion of Life towards the non-human or zoe” (50).
- 2.
While outlining the limitations of strong emergence and panpsychism, cognitive scientist Michael Silberstein encourages us to think of matter as contextual, not the sum of its computations or as intrinsically mental. Contextual emergence looks at how “things emerge from the web of relations in certain contexts” (36:45). Contextual emergence, in other terms, is cultural, environmental, and mental; it is a relational story of mind and matter. See also Braidotti 26, 52, 59.
- 3.
Den Otter makes a strong case for how Barbauld was most likely referring to the tent caterpillar (214).
- 4.
Isobel Grundy notes how the multiplicity of Barbauld’s literary voices “resist dichotomy, encompassing both poetry and prose, and within each mode embracing public oratory and domestic chat, intense seriousness and sly humour, the self-deprecating, the professionally confident, and the overtly ambitious” (23-24). Louise Economides shares how Barbauld “raise[s] serious questions” beneath her “playful veneer” (84).
- 5.
The Age of Empathy (2010).
- 6.
“The Linnet’s Petition” is also a mimetic response to “The Mouse’s Petition.” Robinson began writing poetry in her early teens, but in her Memoirs, she recounts how much Barbauld’s poetry influenced her: “I thought them the most beautiful Poems I had ever seen, and considered the woman who could invent such poetry, as the most to be envied of human creatures” (qtd. in Feldman 590).
- 7.
Diprose’s comment here refers to a passage in “An Unpublished Text by Merleau-Ponty: A Prospectus of His Work” (15, note 54).
- 8.
The eighteenth-century term for people who collected rare specimens on a fairly wide scale is “curiosi” (sg. curioso).
- 9.
Smith carefully footnotes the Latin names. The asterisks denote Smith’s footnoted terms, which I have not included in quotation marks so as not to confuse citations from the verse.
- 10.
In The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty writes, “[e]very organism,” said Uexküll “is a melody that sings unto itself” (159).
- 11.
For example, Theresa M. Kelley notes how Smith incorporates and challenges Linnaean nomenclature by disabling its “rigid binomialism” with common names (239). Mary Ellen Bellanca notes how Dorothy Wordsworth, “[l]ike other women writers” “used anthropomorphism to imagine feeling for, and confer subjectivity on, other living things” (134). Furthering Lawrence Buell’s concept of “dual accountability,” Bellanca notes how nature journals constituted “an intricate triangle of observers’ perceptions, cultural beliefs, and reference to material reality” (41).
References
Abram, David. 2010. In the Depths of a Breathing Planet: Gaia and the Transformation of Experience. In Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis, ed. Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rinker, 221–242. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Barbauld, Anna Letitia. 1994. The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld. Edited by William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Bellanca, Mary Ellen. 2007. Daybooks of Discovery: Nature Diaries in Britain, 1770–1870. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Bergthaller, Hannes. 2014. Limits of Agency: Notes on the Material Turn form a Systems-Theoretical Perspective. In Material Ecocriticism, ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, 37–50. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Buchanen, Brett. 2008. Onto-ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze. Albany: SUNY Press.
De Waal, Frans. 2009. An Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. New York: Three Rivers Press.
Diprose, Rosalyn. 2009. Toward an Ethico-politics of the Posthuman: Foucault and Merleau-Ponty. Parrhesia 8: 7–19.
Economides, Louise. 2016. The Ecology of Wonder in Romantic and Postmodern Literature. New York: Palgrave.
Feldman, Paula R., ed. 1997. British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Grundy, Isobel. 2014. ‘Slip-shod Measure’ and ‘Language of Gods’: Barbauld’s Stylistic Range. In Anna Letitia Barbauld: New perspectives, ed. William McCarthy and Olivia Murphy, 23–36. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.
Guirfa, Martin. 2013. Cognition with Few Neurons: Higher-order Learning in Insects. Trends in Neuroscience 36 (5): 285–294.
Iovino, Serenella. 2016. Posthumanism in Literature and Ecocriticism: Introduction. Relations: Beyond Anthropomorphism 4 (1): 11–20.
Kelley, Theresa M. 2003. Romantic Exemplarity: Botany and ‘Material’ Culture. In Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History, ed. Noah Heringman, 223–254. Albany: SUNY Press.
Landry, Donna. 2000. Green Languages? Women Poets as Naturalists in 1653 and 1807. Huntington Library Quarterly 63 (4): 467–489.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1963. The Structure of Behavior. Trans. Alden Fisher. Boston: Beacon Press.
———. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
———. 2003. Nature: Course Notes form the Collège de France. Trans. Robert Vallier. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Oliver, Kelly. 2008. Strange Kinship: Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty on Animals. Epoché 13 (1): 101–120.
Otter, Alice G. Den. 2004. Pests, Parasites, and Positionality: Anna Letitia Barbauld and ‘The Caterpillar’. Studies in Romanticism 43 (2): 209–230.
Robinson, Mary. 2000. Selected Poems. In Peterborough, ed. Judith Pascoe. Broadview: Canada.
Silberstein, Michael. 2015. Matter, Mind and Meaning. Lecture. Filmed October 12, 2015 at Wesleyan University. http://videos.wesleyan.edu/detail/video/4568092549001. Accessed 30 Apr 2016.
Smith, Charlotte. 1993. The Poems of Charlotte Smith. Edited by Stuart Curran. New York: Oxford University Press.
Toadvine, Ted. 2009. Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Nature. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Webb, Barbara. 2012. Cognition in Insects. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. 367: 2715–2722.
Westling, Louise. 2014. The Logos of the Living World: Merleau-Ponty, Animals, and Language. New York: Fordham University Press.
Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hornbuckle, C.A. (2023). “Strange Kinship”: Romantic-era Women Writers and the Posthuman. In: Hornbuckle, C.A., Smith, J.S., Smith, W.S. (eds) Posthumanism and Phenomenology. Analecta Husserliana, vol 125. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10414-5_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10414-5_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-10413-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-10414-5
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)