Divine Cosmos: Humboldt's Ecology in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Tells the story of how 19th-century American writers re-envisioned science and religion in the age of German naturalist-explorer Alexander von Humboldt's “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 i...