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Deep Time: A Literary History

Online ISBN:
9780691235806
Print ISBN:
9780691235790
Publisher:
Princeton University Press
Book

Deep Time: A Literary History

Noah Heringman
Noah Heringman
University of Missouri
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Published online:
21 September 2023
Published in print:
3 January 2023
Online ISBN:
9780691235806
Print ISBN:
9780691235790
Publisher:
Princeton University Press

Abstract

This book argues that the concept of “deep time”—most often associated with geological epochs—began 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 “the abyss of time” created a way to think about the prehistoric before it was possible to assign dates to the fossil record. The book challenges the conventional wisdom that the idea of deep time came forth fully formed from the modern science of geology. Instead, the book argues, it has a rich imaginative history. The book considers Johann Reinhold Forster and Georg Forster, naturalists on James Cook's 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 “prehistoric song”; and Darwin's exploration of the reciprocal effects of geological and human time. Deep time, the book shows, has figural and imaginative dimensions beyond its geological meaning.

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