I give you my reading list. Yes, it is long and scary-looking, but I’m actually quite excited about it:

Primary Science Texts

Volney, Constantin. A view of the soil and climate of the United States of America : with supplementary remarks upon Florida, on the French Colonies on the Mississippi and Ohio, and in Canada, and on the aboriginal tribes of America. Trans. Charles Brockden Brown. Philadelphia: J. Conrad & Co., 1804. Print.

Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de. Natural History, General and Particular by the Count de Buffon; translated into English, illustrated with above 300 copper-plates, and occasional notes and observations by William Smellie. London: Printed for W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1785. Print.

Dalton, John. A New System of Chemical Philosophy. London: P. Owen, 1965. Print.

De Witt, Joseph. A Chemico-Medical Essay to Explain the Operation of Oxigene or the base of vital air on the Human Body. Philadelphia: printed by William Woodward, 1797. Print.

Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1955. Print.

Lavoisier, Antoine.  Elements of chemistry, in a new systematic order, containing all the modern discoveries. Illustrated with thirteen copperplates. Trans Robert Kerr. Edinburgh: W.Creech, 1790. Print.

Mesmer, Franz Anton. Mesmerism: A Translation of the Original Scientific and Medical Writings of F.A. Mesmer. Trans. George Bloch. Los Altos, California. 1980. Print.

Priestly, Joseph. Experiments and Observations On Different Kinds of Air. London:Printed for J.Johnson, 1774. Print.

Schwann, Theodor. Microscopical Researches into the Accordance in the Structure and Growth of Animals and Plants. London: The Sydenham Society, 1847. Print.

Science and the Nineteenth Century

Chapple, J.A.V. Science and Literature in the Nineteenth Century. London: MacMillan,1986. Print.

Dassow Walls, Laura. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Print.

Gilmore, Paul. Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism: Electricity and American Romanticism. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Higgitt, Rebekah. Recreating Newton: Newtonian Biography and the Making of Nineteenth-Century History of Science. London; Brookfield, Vt: Pickering and Chatto, 2007. Print.

Johnson, Steven. The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Print.

Limon, John. The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science: A Disciplinary History of American Writing. Cambridge, M.A.: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Print.

Swirski, Peter. Between Literature and Science: Poe, Lem, and Explorations in Aesthetics, Cognitive Science, and Literary Knowledge. Montreal; Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000. Print.

Weber, Alan S. Nineteenth Century Science: A Selection of Original Texts. Peterborough, Ont; Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2000. Print.

Wilson, Eric G. The Spiritual History of Ice: Romanticism, Science, and the Imagination. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003. Print.

Ecocriticism

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, M.A.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995. Print.

Love, Glen A. Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003. Print.

Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Print.

Worster, Donald. Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Print.

Charles Brockden Brown Criticism

Doolan, Andy. Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2005. Print.

Goudie, Sean X. Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Print.

Kafer, Peter. Charles Brockden Brown’s Revolution and the Birth of the American Gothic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Print.

Tichi, Cecelia. “Charles Brockden Brown, Translator.” American Literature. 44.1 (1972): 1-12. Print.

Waterman, Bryan. Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. Print.

Melville Criticism

Castiglia, Christopher. Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of  Democracy in the Antebellum United States. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008. Print.

Otter, Samuel. Melville’s Anatomies. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1999. Print.

Race/Nation

 Dimock, Wai Chee. Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. Print.

Gardner, Jared. Master Plots: Race and the Founding of American Literature, 1787-1845. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Print.

Levine, Robert S. Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Print.

Wheeler, Roxann. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Print.

Wilson, Kathleen. The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century. London; New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.