Zimmerman, Virginia Lee-Alice (Author)
Excavating Victorian perceptions and revisions of time, this dissertation analyzes scientific, popular, and literary texts that explore questions and hypotheses posed by geology and archaeology. These new sciences discovered a chronology that dwarfed individual experience, and scientists and poets alike employed narrative strategies to rescue the individual from temporal insignificance. Both cowed and empowered by the sea change of scientific revolutions, Victorian writers struggled to chart a course through deep time. Geology is the subject of the first section, which partners a cultural study of geology's early years with a literary analysis of Tennyson's {italic} The Princess{/italic} (1847). Chapter one focuses on geologists Charles Lyell and Gideon Mantell, both writing in the 1830s and 1840s, who stressed the geologist's power to represent time. Both writers conjoined attention to geological remains with attention to the geologist himself, and they offered the appealing hypothesis that authority over the relics of deep time amounts to authority over time itself. The discussion of geology, time, and authority extends into the next chapter, which offers a close analysis of the medley of science and feminism in {italic}The Princess{/italic}. Crafting a fairy tale in which indifferent Mother Nature rejects deep time in favor of lived time, Tennyson offers a uniformitarian model of reform. The second section addresses archaeology, first in a study of nineteenth- century descriptions of Pompeii and then in an analysis of Dickens's {italic}Little Dorrit{/italic} (1855). Pompeii was a popular subject in poetry, fiction, travel writing, and serial prose. Nineteenth-century observers were especially intrigued with the exhibition of the private, simultaneously preserved and made grotesquely public. Many writers likened the society preserved at Pompeii to their own; some even labeled London the "Pompeii of the future." The final chapter analyzes Dickens's depiction of London as an archaeological site: private and public ruin imprison and debilitate the novel's characters, who struggle to live with the past. Dickens, like so many nineteenth-century writers, ultimately endorses the possibilities inherent in gradualism and empowers the individual to "move on."
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 62 (2002): 2439. UMI order no. 3020412.
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