IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB001022463

Thomas Hardy, Provincial Geology and the Material Imagination (2008)

19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
Volume: 6
Pages: Approx. 8,600 words
Publication date: 2008
Language: English

Publication Date: 2008
Edition Details: Part of a special issue, “Victorian Fiction and the Material Imagination”. http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/index.php/19/article/view/469 (Accessed March 21, 2011).

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Science and literature Natural history Fossils Trade Collectors and collecting 19th century Great Britain Hardy, Thomas Mantell, Gideon Algernon

This essay explores the nineteenth-century traffic and exchange of fossils and natural-historical objects between province and metropolis as represented by two very different geological writers of the period, the fossil collector Gideon Mantell and the novelist Thomas Hardy. The men are connected through Mantell's The Wonders of Geology, the sixth edition of which (1848) Hardy read and utilised for his descriptions of the geological past in his third novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873). These two texts demonstrate a powerful investment in determining the meaning of the geological object according to the social and geographical spaces in which it is discovered, displayed, and discussed, so that the scientific object becomes the site around which complex cultural politics coalesce and sit in tension. In its consideration of the relationship between place and meaning in science, and in its focus on scientific material culture, this essay attempts to disrupt the current spotlight on the interrelationships between scientific law and narrative pattern in Victorian literary studies. Instead, it hopes to contribute to a discussion of the ways in which the novel's attention to scientific objects rather than narratives made it an important site of epistemological enquiry into the basis of scientific knowledge and the inseparability of that knowledge from the discourses and spaces which produced it.

...More

Description On the 19th-century exchange of fossils and natural-historical objects as represented by the fossil collector Gideon Mantell and the novelist Thomas Hardy.

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB001022463

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Book Richard Fallon; (2021)
Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: How the ‘Terrible Lizard' Became a Transatlantic Cultural Icon (/p/isis/citation/CBB569188287/)

Chapter Dawson, Gowan; (2013)
“Like a Megatherium Smoking a Cigar”: Darwin's Beagle Fossils in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture (/p/isis/citation/CBB001422076/)

Article Ingham, Patricia; (1980)
Hardy and The wonders of geology (/p/isis/citation/CBB000001611/)

Thesis Emma Jo Priesendorf; (2021)
Trilobites and the Culture of Wonder in Antebellum America (/p/isis/citation/CBB708237122/)

Article James Andrew Secord; (2022)
Afterword: Hacking's Glyptodon (/p/isis/citation/CBB520635750/)

Thesis McCabe, Elizabeth Caitlin; (2013)
How the Past Remains: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and the Victorian Anthropological Doctrine of Survivals (/p/isis/citation/CBB001567471/)

Article Henchman, Anna; (2008)
Hardy's Stargazers and the Astronomy of Other Minds (/p/isis/citation/CBB001030087/)

Thesis Heather Laura Brink-Roby; (2015)
Typical People in the Nineteenth-Century Novel (/p/isis/citation/CBB154143219/)

Article Sorum, Eve; (2009)
“The Place on the Map”: Geography and Meter in Hardy's Elegies (/p/isis/citation/CBB001032303/)

Article Sara Lyons; (2020)
Thomas Hardy and the Value of Brains (/p/isis/citation/CBB840458699/)

Thesis Coccaro, Adam; (2010)
Evolution and Secular Teleology in the Progressive Epics of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mathilde Blind, and Thomas Hardy (/p/isis/citation/CBB001561129/)

Book Henchman, Anna; (2014)
The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature (/p/isis/citation/CBB001550349/)

Book Murphy, Patricia; (2006)
In Science's Shadow: Literary Constructions of Late Victorian Women (/p/isis/citation/CBB001030166/)

Thesis Henchman, Anna Alexandra; (2004)
Astronomy and the Problem of Perception in British Literature, 1830--1910 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001562098/)

Book Elizabeth Yale; (2016)
Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain (/p/isis/citation/CBB831137700/)

Article Purinton, Marjean D.; (2007)
George Colman's The Iron Chest and Blue-Beard and the Pseudoscience of Curiosity Cabinets (/p/isis/citation/CBB001030103/)

Article Podgorny, Irina; (2013)
Fossil Dealers, the Practices of Comparative Anatomy and British Diplomacy in Latin America, 1820--1840 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001213513/)

Book Freeman, Michael J.; (2004)
Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World (/p/isis/citation/CBB000520147/)

Chapter Pimentel, Juan; (2009)
Across Nations and Ages: The Creole Collector and the Many Lives of the Megatherium (/p/isis/citation/CBB000954200/)

Book Caroline Grigson; (2016)
Menagerie: The History of Exotic Animals in England, 1100-1837 (/p/isis/citation/CBB085087972/)