Deep Time - by Noah Heringman (Paperback)

About the Book

"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.""--

Book Synopsis

How the concept of "deep time" began as a metaphor used by philosophers, poets, and naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

In this interdisciplinary book, Noah Heringman 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. Heringman, examining stories about the deep past by visionary thinkers ranging from William Blake to Charles Darwin, challenges the conventional wisdom that the idea of deep time came forth fully formed from the modern science of geology. Instead, he argues, it has a rich imaginative history.

Heringman 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, Heringman shows, has figural and imaginative dimensions beyond its geological meaning.

Review Quotes

"A marvelous achievement. It moves across space and time with a facility and level of detail that is astonishing. An impressive amount of work has gone into it, clearly demonstrated by the range and scope but also the depth and precision brought to bear on the subject."---Sharon Ruston, Studies in Romanticism

"One might expect a book titled Deep Time: A Literary History to trace the ramifications of geological time through a series of literary works. Noah Heringman's ambitious and erudite study does something far more transformative. . . . This book is an important, indeed momentous, addition to the field of literature and science precisely because of the way it nests an ostensibly scientific concept within literary history without abandoning or even downplaying its empirical value."---Jesse Oak Taylor, Modern Language Quarterly

"[An] important and engagingly well-written book."---Cliff Cunningham, Sun News Austin

"A remarkably learned study. . . . Deep Time doesn't reinterpret the texts we know all too well; it offers instead a new horizon against which to understand these texts, as well as a crucial account of why temporality becomes so rich a question in this period."---Jacob Risinger, European Romantic Review

About the Author

Noah Heringman is Curators' Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Missouri. He is the author of Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology and Sciences of Antiquity: Romantic Antiquarianism, Natural History, and Knowledge Work.