Deep Time: A Literary History
Deep Time: A Literary History
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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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Front Matter
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Introduction
Deep Time: A Counterhistory
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1
Primitive Rocks and Primitive Customs: Geological and Human Time in the Pacific Voyage Narratives of John Reinhold and George Forster
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2
The “Profoundest Depths of Time” in Buffon’s Epochs of Nature
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3
William Blake, the Ballad Revival, and the Deep Past of Poetry
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4
The Descent into Deep Time in Darwin and Lubbock: Voyage Narrative, Comparative Method, and Human Animality
- Afterword Evolutionary Nostalgia and the Romance of Origins
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End Matter
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