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.

About the Author

Noah Heringman is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the editor of Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History.

Reviews

A fascinating study of the rocks of Romanticism, the geology of German and British thinking that flowed out from the field work of early hammer-toting scientists into the libraries, the natural history museums, and the scientific 'cabinets' of Europe.... Noah Heringman has written an important work of literary criticism that does justice to the term 'interdisciplinary' by uniting literary scholarship with the wider sweep of scientific history.... It should be required reading for all professors and graduate students of Romanticism, in the widest sense of that word.

-- Ashton Nichols * Nineteenth-Century Contexts *



Book Information
ISBN 9780801476266
Author Noah Heringman
Format Paperback
Page Count 326
Imprint Cornell University Press
Publisher Cornell University Press
Weight(grams) 907g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 22mm