Divine Cosmos: Humboldt's Ecology in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
(Hardback)
Publishing Details
Divine Cosmos: Humboldt's Ecology in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
By (Author) Dr. or Prof. Lucas Nossaman
Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Bloomsbury Publishing USA
10th July 2025
United States
Classifications
Professional and Scholarly
Non Fiction
Comparative literature
Literary studies: fiction, novelists and prose writers
History of ideas
Physical Properties
Hardback
192
Width 152mm, Height 229mm
Description
Tells the story of how 19th-century American writers re-envisioned science and religion in the age of German naturalist-explorer Alexander von Humboldts cosmic ecology. When Alexander von Humboldt began to publish the volumes of his Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Earth (1845-1859), Americans suddenly found themselves reimagining the natural world. Humboldt presented nature as a cosmos, an interconnected web that exceeded the scientific world of static taxonomy and individual species that 18th-century science had produced. As Lucas Nossaman shows, Humboldts ecology did more than initiate a change in natural science. His writings caused Americans to reconsider how to portray the divine in nature. Inspired by Humboldt, US scientists, theologians, and literary writers participated in what can be described as a final synthesis of science and religion before the arrival of Darwins On the Origin of Species (1859). Writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and Herman Melville utilized their particular religious contexts and employed Humboldtian modes of observation to envision nature holistically rather than in terms of singular evidences of design. They discovered that natural forms connected across regions, and indeed, across the entire divine creation. Nossaman argues that this Divine Cosmos moment provides important background for later conflicts between science and religion including the debate over evolution and for the light it sheds on great US writings influenced by Humboldt. With implications for fields across American Studies, Divine Cosmos argues that early ecological thought transformed how Americans perceived the divine in the natural world.
Author Bio
Lucas Nossaman is Assistant Professor of English and Assistant Director of the Honors College at North Greenville University, USA. His work on American literature has appeared in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Nineteenth-Century Prose, Christianity & Literature, and Renascence.
