This article concerns De Quincey’s attempts to materialize the experience of time. It takes as its focal point De Quincey’s relationship to childhood and his attempts to arrest time in the body of the child. It addresses De Quincey’s encounters with childhood in “Confessions of an English Opium‐Eater,” the Savannah‐la‐Mar section of “Suspiria de Profundis,” and his little‐read story “The Spanish Military Nun.” For De Quincey, children share with the opium eater the ability to transgress the boundaries between then and now, here and not‐here. Like the drowning woman and the opium‐eater, they can access information and experiences ordinarily closed to adults, and like the drowning woman and the opium eater, their access is produced through ruin.
When a team of researchers in 2018 found that plants exposed to anesthesia appeared to lose consciousness, the press reported that plants might have a consciousness to lose. The ensuing debate revealed a gap between scientific and literary approaches to human and nonhuman consciousness that this article traces back to the botanical writing of the Romantic period. These concerns, I argue, are central to Elizabeth Kent’s Flora Domestica (1823) and Sylvan Sketches (1825), both botanical works that double as literary anthologies in order to expose a productive gap between literary and scientific knowledge. In a time when the distinction between science and poetry could frequently blur, Kent’s works navigate these boundaries with particular attention to the kinds of relationships each entails. In so doing, I argue, she advances an ethics of care attuned to consciousnesses beyond our understanding, rooted in the contested borderland between scientific and poetic knowledge.
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