The Earth on Show
The Earth on Show

Author: Ralph O'Connor

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-09-15

Total Pages: 557

ISBN-13: 0226616703

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

At the turn of the nineteenth century, geology—and its claims that the earth had a long and colorful prehuman history—was widely dismissedasdangerous nonsense. But just fifty years later, it was the most celebrated of Victorian sciences. Ralph O’Connor tracks the astonishing growth of geology’s prestige in Britain, exploring how a new geohistory far more alluring than the standard six days of Creation was assembled and sold to the wider Bible-reading public. Shrewd science-writers, O’Connor shows, marketed spectacular visions of past worlds, piquing the public imagination with glimpses of man-eating mammoths, talking dinosaurs, and sea-dragons spawned by Satan himself. These authors—including men of science, women, clergymen, biblical literalists, hack writers, blackmailers, and prophets—borrowed freely from the Bible, modern poetry, and the urban entertainment industry, creating new forms of literature in order to transport their readers into a vanished and alien past. In exploring the use of poetry and spectacle in the promotion of popular science, O’Connor proves that geology’s success owed much to the literary techniques of its authors. An innovative blend of the history of science, literary criticism, book history, and visual culture, The Earth on Show rethinks the relationship between science and literature in the nineteenth century.

Critical Metals Handbook
Critical Metals Handbook

Author: Gus Gunn

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2014-01-06

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 1118755219

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Mankind is using a greater variety of metals in greater quantities than ever before. As a result there is increasing global concern over the long-term availability of secure and adequate supplies of the metals needed by society. Critical metals, which are those of growing economic importance that might be susceptible to future scarcity, are a particular worry. For many of these we have little information on how they are concentrated in the Earth’s crust, how to extract them from their ores, and how to use, recycle and dispose of them effectively and safely. Published with the British Geological Survey, the Critical Metals Handbook brings together a wealth of knowledge on critical metals and provides a foundation for improving the future security and sustainability of critical metal supplies. Written by international experts, it provides a unique source of authoritative information on diverse aspects of the critical metals, including geology, deposits, processing, applications, recycling, environmental issues and markets. It is aimed at a broad non-specialist audience, including professionals and academics working in the exploration and mining sectors, in mining finance and investment, and in mineral processing and manufacturing. It will also be a valuable reference for policy makers concerned with resource management, land-use planning, eco-efficiency, recycling and related fields.

Myth and Geology
Myth and Geology

Author: Luigi Piccardi

Publisher: Geological Society of London

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 9781862392168

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"This book is the first peer-reviewed collection of papers focusing on the potential of myth storylines to yield data and lessons that are of value to the geological sciences. Building on the nascent discipline of geomythology, scientists and scholars from a variety of disciplines have contributed to this volume. The geological hazards (such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and cosmic impacts) that have given rise to myths are considered, as are the sacred and cultural values associated with rocks, fossils, geological formations and landscapes. There are also discussions about the historical and literary perspectives of geomythology. Regional coverage includes Europe and the Mediterranean, Afghanistan, Cameroon, India, Australia, Japan, Pacific islands, South America and North America. Myth and Geology challenges the widespread notion that myths are fictitious or otherwise lacking in value for the physical sciences." -- BOOK JACKET.

The Geological Unconscious
The Geological Unconscious

Author: Jason Groves

Publisher: Fordham University Press

Published: 2020-07-07

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0823288110

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Already in the nineteenth century, German-language writers were contending with the challenge of imagining and accounting for a planet whose volatility bore little resemblance to the images of the Earth then in circulation. The Geological Unconscious traces the withdrawal of the lithosphere as a reliable setting, unobtrusive backdrop, and stable point of reference for literature written well before the current climate breakdown. Through a series of careful readings of romantic, realist, and modernist works by Tieck, Goethe, Stifter, Benjamin, and Brecht, Groves elaborates a geological unconscious—unthought and sometimes actively repressed geological knowledge—in European literature and environmental thought. This inhuman horizon of reading and interpretation offers a new literary history of the Anthropocene in a period before it was named. These close readings show the entanglement of the human and the lithic in periods well before the geological turn of contemporary cultural studies. In those depictions of human-mineral encounters, the minerality of the human and the minerality of the imagination become apparent. In registering libidinal investments in the lithosphere that extend beyond Carboniferous deposits and beyond any carbon imaginary, The Geological Unconscious points toward alternative relations with, and less destructive mobilizations of, the geologic.

Anthropocene Reading
Anthropocene Reading

Author: Tobias Menely

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2017-10-13

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0271080396

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Few terms have garnered more attention recently in the sciences, humanities, and public sphere than the Anthropocene, the proposed epoch in which a human “signature” appears in the lithostratigraphic record. Anthropocene Reading considers the implications of this concept for literary history and critical method. Entering into conversation with geologists and geographers, this volume reinterprets the cultural past in relation to the anthropogenic transformation of the Earth system while showcasing how literary analysis may help us conceptualize this geohistorical event. The contributors examine how a range of literary texts, from The Tempest to contemporary dystopian novels to the poetry of Emily Dickinson, mediate the convergence of the social institutions, energy regimes, and planetary systems that support the reproduction of life. They explore the long-standing dialogue between imaginative literature and the earth sciences and show how scientists, novelists, and poets represent intersections of geological and human timescales, the deep past and a posthuman future, political exigency and the carbon cycle. Accessibly written and representing a range of methodological perspectives, the essays in this volume consider what it means to read literary history in the Anthropocene. Contributors include Juliana Chow, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Thomas H. Ford, Anne-Lise François, Noah Heringman, Matt Hooley, Stephanie LeMenager, Dana Luciano, Steve Mentz, Benjamin Morgan, Justin Neuman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Derek Woods.

Novel Science
Novel Science

Author: Adelene Buckland

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2013-04-12

Total Pages: 395

ISBN-13: 0226079686

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

Strata
Strata

Author: Oxford University Museum of Natural History

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9780226754888

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"The story starts with William Smith's early years, from apprentice to surveyor for hire, and from publication of his groundbreaking 1815 geological strata map to imprisonment for debt. Smith's 1799 geological map of Bath and table of strata, his first strata map of England and Wales, published in 1801, and photographs of some of Smith's collection of 2,000 fossils illustrate the tale. The remainder of the book is organized into four parts, each beginning with four sheets from Smith's hand-colored, 1815 strata map, accompanied by related geological cross sections and county maps (1819-24), and followed by sections of Sowerby's fossil illustrations (1816-19), organized by strata. Interleaved between the sections are essays by scholars that focus on the people and industries that benefited from the knowledge imparted by Smith's work. Concluding the volume are reflections on Smith's later years as an itinerant geologist and surveyor, plagiarism by a rival, receipt of the first Wollaston Medal in recognition of his achievements, and the influence of his geological mapping and biostratigraphical theories on the sciences, which culminated in the establishment of the modern geological timescale"--

Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology
Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology

Author: Noah Heringman

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2011-02-23

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 0801457513

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Why are rocks and landforms so prominent in British Romantic poetry? Why, for example, does Shelley choose a mountain as the locus of a "voice... to repeal / large codes of fraud and woe"? Why does a cliff, in the boat-stealing episode of Wordsworth's Prelude, chastise the young thief? Why is petrifaction, or "stonifying," in Blake's coinage, the ultimate figure of dehumanization? Noah Heringman maintains that British literary culture was fundamentally shaped by many of the same forces that created geology as a science in the period 1770–1820. He shows that landscape aesthetics—the verbal and social idiom of landscape gardening, natural history, the scenic tour, and other forms of outdoor "improvement"—provided a shared vernacular for geology and Romanticism in their formative stages.Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology reexamines a wide range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry to discover its relationship to a broad cultural consensus on the nature and value of rocks and landforms. Equally interested in the initial surge of curiosity about the earth and the ensuing process of specialization, Heringman contributes to a new understanding of literature as a key forum for the modern reorganization of knowledge.