Thesis ID: CBB001567320

Fossil Poetry, the Birth of Geology, and the Romantic Imagination, 1790--1860 (2011)

unapi

Higgins, John Robert (Author)


Walls, Laura
Adams, Katherine
Jarrells, Anthony
University of South Carolina
Walls, Laura
Talwani, Pradeep
Adams, Katherine
Jarrells, Anthony
Feldman, Paula R
Talwani, Pradeep


Publication Date: 2011
Edition Details: Advisor: Feldman, Paula R; Committee Members: Walls, Laura, Talwani, Pradeep, Adams, Katherine, Jarrells, Anthony.
Physical Details: 349 pp.
Language: English

Neither nineteenth-century poetry nor early geology can be completely understood without exploring the synergistic relationship between the two disciplines, their shared "matrix." Poetry and geology continually intersected throughout the infancy of the science, with geologists admiring the power and importance of poetic truth and perception, and poetry responding to the challenges posed by geologists to the human relation to nature. This broad survey of poetry written between 1790 and 1860 describes a "consilience," or synergistic relationship, between creative and scientific literatures as an engine of discovery and understanding in the nineteenth century. Poetry's exploration of the relation between the subjective and objective experiences of the natural world aided geologists in first imagining and then communicating the dizzying, sublime notions of deep time, vanished animals, and lost worlds. This study traces the parallel development of the scientific theory of the earth and the poetry with which it was partnered, especially in the figure of its most expressive and symbolic figure: the fossil. If we are truly to understand the intellectual climate of the Romantic and early-Victorian eras, we must shed our own tendencies to segregate the two cultures of science and literature. Geology particularly illustrates that nineteenth-century scientists privileged the rhetorical power and truthfulness of poetry, even regarding poetic language as an essential means of engaging with the world as rational, scientific observation.

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Description Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 72/11, May 2012. Proquest Document ID: 889964733.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001567320/

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Authors & Contributors
Goldstein, Amanda Jo
Whitehead, James
Carli, Alberto
Perrone Capano, Lucia
Kent Robert Linthicum
Maierhofer, Waltraud
Concepts
Science and literature
Romanticism
Poetry and poetics
Nature and its relationship to culture; human-nature relationships
Geology
Aesthetics
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
Enlightenment
17th century
Places
Great Britain
Germany
Italy
United States
Netherlands
Institutions
Arcadia
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