'The masculine loco-descriptive tradition'

 I recently bought a modern edition (2010) of the Life of Erasmus Darwin written by the 'Swan of Lichfield', Anna Seward (pronounced, I was surprised to learn, 'See-ward'). Seward has recently attracted the attention of academics, for her sometimes innovative proto-Romantic verse and other writings, for her unconventional (and in modern terms unclassifiable) love life, and for being a respected woman writer in a then very male-dominated literary world. Whether her biography of Darwin is any good I have yet to discover, having only just got through the lengthy Introduction, which, while full of interest, reads rather like a reheated thesis or dissertation. I laughed out loud at a quotation from one Sharon Seltzer, who declares that Seward's poems on the famous early industrial site Coalbrookdale are 'a significant intervention in the masculine loco-descriptive tradition'. A little later, the author of the Introduction describes Seward's literary criticism as 'worthy of our attention because it evokes a deeply relational mode of analytic thought and creative work not always associated with late 18th-century literature'. Deeply relational, eh?
  As for Erasmus Darwin, he remains very present in Lichfield. Yesterday I spotted the most unlikely tribute to the great man and the Lunar Society of which he was a leading light: the Brewhouse and Kitchen pub, which brews its own beers, has a red rye ale (dry, amber aromatic) called Lunartick [sic]. I must try it some time...