"Novel Science" is the first in-depth study of the
shocking, groundbreaking, and sometimes beautiful
writings of the gentlemen of the "heroic age" of geology
and of the contribution these men made to the literary
culture of their day. For these men, literature was an
essential part of the practice of science itself, as
important to their efforts as mapmaking, fieldwork, and
observation. The reading and writing of imaginative
literatures helped them to discover, imagine, debate,
and give shape and meaning to millions of years of
previously undiscovered earth history. Borrowing from
the historical fictions of Walter Scott and the poetry
of Lord Byron, they invented geology as a science,
discovered many of the creatures we now call the
dinosaurs, and were the first to unravel and map the
sequence and structure of stratified rock. As Adelene
Buckland shows, they did this by rejecting the grand
narratives of older theories of the earth or of biblical
cosmogony: theirs would be a humble science, faithfully
recording minute details and leaving the big picture for
future generations to paint. Buckland also reveals how
these scientists - just as they had drawn inspiration
from their literary predecessors - gave Victorian
realist novelists such as George Eliot, Charles
Kingsley, and Charles Dickens a powerful language with
which to create dark and disturbing ruptures in the
too-seductive sweep of story.
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