Deep Time
A Literary History
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"Deep Time: A Literary History challenges the exclusive association between deep time and the modern science of geology by focusing on late Enlightenment writings that used narrative form to integrate new empirical data and methods with Western and non-Western traditions of chronology, earth history, and human origins. Choosing the mid-eighteenth century as a starting point, Heringman aims to demonstrate how deep time became associated with Earth history in the first place, expanding its conceptual domain to include colonial natural history, oral tradition, and scientific romance-all frontiers...
"Deep Time: A Literary History challenges the exclusive association between deep time and the modern science of geology by focusing on late Enlightenment writings that used narrative form to integrate new empirical data and methods with Western and non-Western traditions of chronology, earth history, and human origins. Choosing the mid-eighteenth century as a starting point, Heringman aims to demonstrate how deep time became associated with Earth history in the first place, expanding its conceptual domain to include colonial natural history, oral tradition, and scientific romance-all frontiers of the expanded time horizons associated with modernity. It considers the conceptual opening of a modern geological timescale in literary, scientific, and travel writing in the late-Enlightenment/Romantic period, with chapters on the explorer-naturalist team of John Reinhold and George Forster, who sailed with Captain Cook (1772-1775); Buffon's protogeochronological Epochs of Nature (1778); Herder, Blake, and prehistory through oral tradition; and Charles Darwin's dialogue with anthropology and archaeology, especially in The Descent of Man (1871). When eighteenth- and nineteenth-century explorers, naturalists, poets, and philosophers wrote about the "abyss of time," they referred to a large and diverse set of new ideas that unsettled the established time scale: ideas about cultural evolution inspired by Pacific peoples recently encountered by James Cook and other voyagers; a new sense of the depth and diversity of the Earth's strata, produced by increased attention to their structure and deposition; the study of oral traditions by poets and scholars associated with the ballad revival; and the study of non-Western scriptures such as the Mahabharata, which calculated time on an entirely different scale. The latter two pursuits dovetailed with the investigations of voyagers from Johann Reinhold Forster to Charles Darwin, who sought to measure the age of non-European civilizations by way of the geological age of their environments. Ultimately, Heringman argues that the concept of deep time, now associated primarily with modern geology, "was a composite of human and natural history to begin with.""--
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