Overview

In How the Earth Feels Dana Luciano examines the impacts of the new science of geology on nineteenth-century US culture. Drawing on early geological writings, Indigenous and settler accounts of earthquakes, African American antislavery literature, and other works, Luciano reveals how geology catalyzed transformative conversations regarding the intersections between humans and the nonhuman world. She shows that understanding the earth's history geologically involved confronting the dynamic nature of inorganic matter over vast spans of time, challenging preconceived notions of human agency. Nineteenth-century Americans came to terms with these changes through a fusion of fact and imagination that Luciano calls geological fantasy. Geological fantasy transformed the science into a sensory experience, sponsoring affective and even erotic connections to the matter of the earth. At the same time, it was often used to justify accounts of evolution that posited a modern, civilized, and Anglo-American whiteness as the pinnacle of human development. By tracing geology's relationship with biopower, Luciano illuminates how imagined connections with the earth shaped American dynamics of power, race, and colonization.

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9781478025702

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Reviews

“Tracking the strange pleasures and anxieties around geologic thinking in literary texts, popular culture, and scientific disciplines, Dana Luciano beautifully renders how time is felt and experienced at different scales and intensities. Her account of how biopolitics underwrote the pleasingly terrifying view of deep time as expressed by the fossil record is a signature accomplishment. How the Earth Feels makes a stunningly original contribution. I savored every sentence in this book.” - Stephanie Foote, author of (The Parvenu's Plot: Gender, Culture, and Class in the Age of Realism) “This wide-ranging book takes geology as nothing less than the foundation of modernity, a form of world-making extending from the nineteenth century to our own time, featuring the giddy fantasies of racism and colonialism as much as the rigors of a new science. Empiricism and materialism double here as biopolitics. Clear-eyed, lucid, timely.” - Wai Chee Dimock, author of (Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival) ""In this compellingly argued and beautifully written monograph, Luciano (Rutgers Univ.) discusses 19th-century scientific and literary writings about the emerging field of geology as a rigorous field of inquiry. . . . Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals."" - D. J. Rosenthal (Choice) ""[How the Earth Feels] is not only an original contribution to the environmental humanities and American cultural history, offering a detailed exploration of the relationship between science and society in the nineteenth century, but it also provides essential insights for scholars engaged with the Anthropocene today."" - Amanda Halter (Amerikastudien)

“Tracking the strange pleasures and anxieties around geologic thinking in literary texts, popular culture, and scientific disciplines, Dana Luciano beautifully renders how time is felt and experienced at different scales and intensities. Her account of how biopolitics underwrote the pleasingly terrifying view of deep time as expressed by the fossil record is a signature accomplishment. How the Earth Feels makes a stunningly original contribution. I savored every sentence in this book.” -- Stephanie Foote, author of * The Parvenu’s Plot: Gender, Culture, and Class in the Age of Realism * “This wide-ranging book takes geology as nothing less than the foundation of modernity, a form of world-making extending from the nineteenth century to our own time, featuring the giddy fantasies of racism and colonialism as much as the rigors of a new science. Empiricism and materialism double here as biopolitics. Clear-eyed, lucid, timely.” -- Wai Chee Dimock, author of * Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival *

“Tracking the strange pleasures and anxieties around geologic thinking in literary texts, popular culture, and scientific disciplines, Dana Luciano beautifully renders how time is felt and experienced at different scales and intensities. Her account of how biopolitics underwrote the pleasingly terrifying view of deep time as expressed by the fossil record is a signature accomplishment. How the Earth Feels makes a stunningly original contribution. I savored every sentence in this book.” -- Stephanie Foote, author of * The Parvenu’s Plot: Gender, Culture, and Class in the Age of Realism *

Author Information

Dana Luciano is Associate Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University and author of Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America.

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