FRINK Linked Data Fragments server

Matches in SemOpenAlex for { <https://semopenalex.org/work/W2065643573> ?p ?o ?g. }

• W2065643573 endingPage "39" @default.
• W2065643573 startingPage "15" @default.
• W2065643573 abstract "Emerson, Embryology, and Culture Jennifer J. Baker (bio) One of the most striking recent developments in the historiography of nineteenth-century science has been the increased recognition that European romanticism contributed to the rise of evolutionary theory. Although Thomas Henry Huxley and other Victorian biologists worked hard to distance themselves from more transcendentalist romantic thinkers and were convinced that romanticism had to be overturned in order for rigorous, empirical science to take hold, scholars of the last three decades have argued that a romantic understanding of the natural world helped lay the groundwork for Charles Darwin’s reconceptualization of speciation.1 In fact, before “evolution” took on its specifically Darwinian and transmutationist sense, the biological application of the term, which had originated in embryo studies, meant simply organic development or unfolding. As such, this earlier concept of evolution was central to the romantic notion of a universe that was always in a state of gestation. In hindsight, it is easy to see how a romantic vision of a dynamic natural world—a vision that A.O. Lovejoy famously contrasted with the neoclassical understanding of the universe as static and mechanical—might have shaped new thinking about organic development and biodiversity.2 Especially crucial to this view of organic development was the romantic tradition in embryology, which held up the gestating embryo as proof of nature’s essential tendency to flux. What made the embryo particularly compelling was that it simultaneously kept intact the notion of nature’s underlying metaphysical order. For transcendentalist embryologists, such as Lorenz Oken, Étienne Geoffroy St.–Hilaire, and Louis Agassiz, the dramatic transformations of animal embryos “recapitulated” [End Page 15] a preordained progression of species from lower to higher orders: the expression of gills and a tail in early stages of human embryonic development, for example, were taken as indication that humans were the culmination of a purposeful ascent in the animal kingdom. Although romantic embryology posited this chain of ascent in metaphysical terms, it was only a matter of time before it suggested to Darwin, Huxley, Ernst Haeckel, and others a genealogical relation between an organism and the less complex forms from which it had descended. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s encounter with the embryology of Oken, Geoffroy, and Agassiz reveals in vivid detail how biological theories steeped in romantic notions of dynamism, on the one hand, and teleology, on the other, facilitated the acceptance of transmutation theories among Victorian American readers. Emerson scholars have been intrigued with the extent to which a thinker so moved by the notion of a spiritually imbued natural world came to embrace Darwin’s materialist theory of species transmutation. Some readers might conclude that Emerson read Darwin selectively or simply endorsed new ideas without bothering to square them with the old.3 Other readers, taking up Branka Arsić’s recent argument for Emerson’s coherence as a thinker, might understand this seeming eclecticism as, in fact, a literary practice of systematically transplanting terms from one discourse to another.4 Still others might see his approval of Darwin as a consequence of his growing sense, beginning in the mid-1840s, that the natural world was alien to humans. In this essay, however, I would like to shift attention away from Emerson’s idiosyncrasies and consider the possibility that the eagerness with which he absorbed transmutationist theories without fully discarding romantic metaphysics was both typical for his time and also a direct result of the way transmutation was understood as an embryological phenomenon. Essential to Emerson’s reconciliation of the concepts of material transmutation and metaphysical order, as Philip Nicoloff, Laura Dassow Walls, and William Rossi have shown, was his reading of Robert Chambers’s controversial and anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). Chambers envisioned transmutation as originating in the embryo and proceeding teleologically along preordained lines of ascent that culminated with humans. He posited that all life-forms start out as the same embryonic structure, the mature form determined only by the point at which development is “arrested.” Higher orders of animals result from longer gestations, he reasoned, while those of the lower orders are less complex precisely because their development has somehow [End Page 16] been held..." @default.
• W2065643573 created "2016-06-24" @default.
• W2065643573 creator A5006442953 @default.
• W2065643573 date "2015-01-01" @default.
• W2065643573 modified "2023-10-17" @default.
• W2065643573 title "Emerson, Embryology, and Culture" @default.
• W2065643573 cites W1510309942 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W1529731715 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W1533488714 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W1588166459 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W1593551567 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W1597338967 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W1968939366 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W1997147016 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W2006585726 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W2009828364 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W2019830808 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W2028606200 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W2048083683 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W2088909985 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W2102207363 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W2102565740 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W2122723077 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W2130879212 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W2148569301 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W2150157510 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W2259697212 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W2313016949 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W2319814439 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W2327199079 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W2506868775 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W2896444394 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W2896937175 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W563081660 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W568868796 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W573238379 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W589401125 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W607584165 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W630981464 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W641969465 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W649409313 @default.
• W2065643573 cites W649999890 @default.
• W2065643573 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/jnc.2015.0004" @default.
• W2065643573 hasPublicationYear "2015" @default.
• W2065643573 type Work @default.
• W2065643573 sameAs 2065643573 @default.
• W2065643573 citedByCount "1" @default.
• W2065643573 countsByYear W20656435732017 @default.
• W2065643573 crossrefType "journal-article" @default.
• W2065643573 hasAuthorship W2065643573A5006442953 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConcept C111472728 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConcept C11171543 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConcept C124952713 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConcept C127413603 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConcept C138885662 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConcept C142362112 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConcept C15744967 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConcept C166957645 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConcept C182744844 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConcept C196919123 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConcept C201995342 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConcept C206118921 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConcept C2776608160 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConcept C2778584255 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConcept C32685002 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConcept C518914266 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConcept C70721018 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConcept C95457728 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConceptScore W2065643573C111472728 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConceptScore W2065643573C11171543 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConceptScore W2065643573C124952713 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConceptScore W2065643573C127413603 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConceptScore W2065643573C138885662 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConceptScore W2065643573C142362112 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConceptScore W2065643573C15744967 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConceptScore W2065643573C166957645 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConceptScore W2065643573C182744844 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConceptScore W2065643573C196919123 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConceptScore W2065643573C201995342 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConceptScore W2065643573C206118921 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConceptScore W2065643573C2776608160 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConceptScore W2065643573C2778584255 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConceptScore W2065643573C32685002 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConceptScore W2065643573C518914266 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConceptScore W2065643573C70721018 @default.
• W2065643573 hasConceptScore W2065643573C95457728 @default.
• W2065643573 hasIssue "1" @default.
• W2065643573 hasLocation W20656435731 @default.
• W2065643573 hasOpenAccess W2065643573 @default.
• W2065643573 hasPrimaryLocation W20656435731 @default.
• W2065643573 hasRelatedWork W102495582 @default.
• W2065643573 hasRelatedWork W1978150023 @default.
• W2065643573 hasRelatedWork W1988274091 @default.
• W2065643573 hasRelatedWork W2065643573 @default.
• W2065643573 hasRelatedWork W2349647407 @default.
• W2065643573 hasRelatedWork W2387907468 @default.
• W2065643573 hasRelatedWork W2496964193 @default.
• W2065643573 hasRelatedWork W2615415291 @default.

• next