| Summary |
Annotation This collection of essays explores how Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment developments in the earth sciences and related fields (paleontology, mining, archeology, seismology, oceanography, evolution, etc.) impacted on contemporary French culture. They reveal that geological ideas were a much more pervasive and influential cultural force than has hitherto been supposed. From the mid-eighteenth century, with the publication of Buffon¿s seminal Théorie de la Terre (1749), until the early twentieth century, concepts and figures drawn from the earth sciences inspired some of the most important French philosophers, novelists, political theorists, historians and popularizers of science of the time. This book charts the original and influential ways in which French writers and thinkers, such as Buffon, d¿Holbach, Balzac, Sand, Verne, Gide and Malraux, exploited the earth sciences for very different ends. This volume will be of interest to students, researchers and scholars of French literature in the modern period, cultural historians of modern France, scholars of European studies, of French political history, of the History of Ideas or the History of Science as well as researchers in landscape and physical geography. Louise Lyle is Lecturer in French at the University of London Institute in Paris. She researches and has published on the interface of science and literature in fin-de-siècle France, specifically the use of social Darwinism in this period. David McCallam is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Sheffield, UK. He is author of Chamfort and the French Revolution (Oxford, 2002) and L¿Art de l¿équivoque chez Laclos (Geneva, 2008), as well as of a number of articles on late eighteenth-century French volcanology.Table of ContentsList of ContributorsAcknowledgementsLouise LYLE and David MCCALLAM: IntroductionSection 1: The EnlightenmentBenoît DE BAERE: Natural Catastrophe in Buffon¿s Histoire Naturelle: Earth Science, Aesthetics, AnthropologyGrégory QUENET: When Geology Encounters a Real Catastrophe: From Theoretical Earthquakes to the Lisbon DisasterRebecca FORD: Images of the Earth, Images of Man: The Mineralogical Plates of the EncyclopédieIan D. ROTHERHAM and David MCCALLAM: Peat Bogs, Marshes and Fen as Disputed Landscapes in Late Eighteenth-Century France and EnglandSection 2: Early to Mid-Nineteenth CenturyGreg KERR: ¿Nous avons enlacé le globe de nos réseaux¿¿: Spatial Structure in Saint-Simonian PoeticsCeri CROSSLEY: Pierre Leroux and the Circulus: Soil, Socialism and Salvation in Nineteenth-Century FranceScott SPRENGER: Mind as Ruin: Balzac¿s ¿Sarrasine¿ and the Archaeology of Self Claire LE GUILLOU: Archaeology ¿ A Passion of George SandSection 3: Late Nineteenth CenturyTim UNWIN: Jules Verne and the Discovery of the Natural WorldAnca MITROI: Jules Verne¿s Transylvania: Cartographic OmissionsKiera VACLAVIK: Undermining Body and Mind? The Impact of the Underground in Nineteenth-Century Children¿s LiteratureBen FISHER: Alfred Jarry¿s Neo-Science: Liquidizing Paris and Debunking VerneSection 4: Early Twentieth CenturyLouise LYLE: Reading Environmental Apocalypse in J.-H. Rosny Aîné¿s Terrestrial TextsDavid H. WALKER : André Gide, Eugène Rouart and le retour à la terreMartin HURCOMBE: Down to Earth: André Malraux¿s Political Itinerary and the Natural WorldIndex of Names |
