Book ID: CBB576619337

How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth-Century United States (2024)

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Dana Luciano (Author)


Duke University Press


Publication Date: 2024
Physical Details: 256
Language: English

In How the Earth Feels Dana Luciano examines the impacts of the new science of geology on nineteenth-century US culture. Drawing on early geological writings, Indigenous and settler accounts of earthquakes, African American antislavery literature, and other works, Luciano reveals how geology catalyzed transformative conversations regarding the intersections between humans and the nonhuman world. She shows that understanding the earth’s history geologically involved confronting the dynamic nature of inorganic matter over vast spans of time, challenging preconceived notions of human agency. Nineteenth-century Americans came to terms with these changes through a fusion of fact and imagination that Luciano calls geological fantasy. Geological fantasy transformed the science into a sensory experience, sponsoring affective and even erotic connections to the matter of the earth. At the same time, it was often used to justify accounts of evolution that posited a modern, civilized, and Anglo-American whiteness as the pinnacle of human development. By tracing geology’s relationship with biopower, Luciano illuminates how imagined connections with the earth shaped American dynamics of power, race, and colonization.

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB576619337/

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Authors & Contributors
Abbate, Janet
Alagona, Peter S.
Brenna, Brita
Brice, William R.
Dick, Stephanie
Fisher, Colin
Journals
Environmental History
French Historical Studies
History of Science
Journal of the History of Ideas
Oil-Industry History
Physics in Perspective
Publishers
University of California Press
University of Chicago
Ashgate
Duke University Press
Harvard University Press
Johns Hopkins University Press
Concepts
Nature and its relationship to culture; human-nature relationships
Science and society
Geology
Social relations; social groups
Discipline formation
Natural history
People
Carson, Rachel Louise
Daly, Charles Patrick
Darwin, Charles Robert
Delany, Martin
King, Clarence
Lyell, Charles
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
21st century
18th century
20th century, early
17th century
Places
United States
France
Great Britain
Denmark
Norway
Oklahoma (U.S.)
Institutions
American Geographical Society
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