In this interdisciplinary book, Noah Heringman argues that the concept of 鈥渄eep time鈥濃�攎ost often associated with geological epochs鈥攂egan as a metaphorical language used by philosophers, poets, and naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to explore the origins of life beyond the written record. Their ideas about 鈥渢he abyss of time鈥� created a way to think about the prehistoric before it was possible to assign dates to the fossil record. Heringman, examining stories about the deep past by visionary thinkers ranging from William Blake to Charles Darwin, challenges the conventional wisdom that the idea of deep time came forth fully formed from the modern science of geology. Instead, he argues, it has a rich imaginative history.
Heringman considers Johann Reinhold Forster and Georg Forster, naturalists on James Cook鈥檚 second voyage around the world, who, inspired by encounters with Pacific islanders, connected the scale of geological time to human origins and cultural evolution; Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who drew on travel narrative, antiquarian works, and his own fieldwork to lay out the first modern geological timescale; Blake and Johann Gottfried Herder, who used the language of fossils and artifacts to promote ancient ballads and 鈥減rehistoric song鈥�; and Darwin鈥檚 exploration of the reciprocal effects of geological and human time. Deep time, Heringman shows, has figural and imaginative dimensions beyond its geological meaning.
Noah Heringman is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Missouri. He is the author of Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology and Sciences of Antiquity: Romantic Antiquarianism, Natural History, and Knowledge Work.
"[An] important and engagingly well-written book."鈥擟liff Cunningham, Sun News Austin
"A remarkably learned study. . . . Deep Time doesn’t reinterpret the texts we know all too well; it offers instead a new horizon against which to understand these texts, as well as a crucial account of why temporality becomes so rich a question in this period."鈥擩acob Risinger, European Romantic Review
"One might expect a book titled Deep Time: A Literary History to trace the ramifications of geological time through a series of literary works. Noah Heringman’s ambitious and erudite study does something far more transformative. . . . This book is an important, indeed momentous, addition to the field of literature and science precisely because of the way it nests an ostensibly scientific concept within literary history without abandoning or even downplaying its empirical value."鈥擩esse Oak Taylor, Modern Language Quarterly
"A marvelous achievement. It moves across space and time with a facility and level of detail that is astonishing. An impressive amount of work has gone into it, clearly demonstrated by the range and scope but also the depth and precision brought to bear on the subject."鈥擲haron Ruston, Studies in Romanticism
“An excellent book, Deep Time historicizes the important topics of deep time and the Anthropocene. With an extraordinary range of reference, from Buffon to J. G. Ballard, Noah Heringman shows the warp and woof of deep time through key texts and brings the past into present relevance.”—Gillen D’Arcy Wood, author of Land of Wondrous Cold: The Race to Discover Antarctica and the Secrets of Its Ice
“Heringman offers a brilliant counterhistory of the geological imagination, showing how speculation about humanity’s deep past, as recorded in ancient myths, monuments, and migrations, inspired a revolutionary new way of envisaging the scale of Earth history. As we seek forms of knowledge adequate to the Anthropocene proposal, Heringman invites us to reconsider those predisciplinary modes of inquiry, such as scientific romance and philosophical anthropology, that first sought to situate human antiquity in the tumult of planetary time.”—Tobias Menely, author of Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics
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