Histoires de la terre : : earth sciences and French culture, 1740-1940 / / edited by Louise Lyle and David McCallam.

• Superior document: Faux titre ; 322
• TeilnehmendeR: Lyle, Louise.; McCallam, David.
• Year of Publication: 2008
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Faux titre ; 322.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (273 p.)
• Notes: Selected conference papers.

This collection of essays explores how Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment developments in the earth sciences and related fields (paleontology, mining, archeology, seismology, oceanography, evolution, et cetera) 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.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- List of Contributors -- Acknowledgements -- Louise Lyle and David McCallam -- Natural Catastrophe in Buffon’s Histoire naturelle: Earth, Science, Aesthetics, Anthropology / Benoît de Baere -- When Geology Encounters a Real Catastrophe: From Theoretical Earthquakes to the Lisbon Disaster / Grégory Quenet -- Images of the Earth, Images of Man: The Mineralogical Plates of the Encyclopédie / Rebecca Ford -- Peat Bogs, Marshes and Fen as Disputed Landscapes in Late Eighteenth-Century France and England / Ian D. Rotherham and David McCallam -- “Nous avons enlacé le globe de nos réseaux…”: Spatial Structure in Saint-Simonian Poetics / Greg Kerr -- Pierre Leroux and the Circulus: Soil, Socialism and Salvation in Nineteenth-Century France / Ceri Crossley -- Mind as Ruin: Balzac’s “Sarrasine” and the Archaeology of Self / Scott Sprenger -- Archaeology – A Passion of George Sand / Claire Le Guillou -- Jules Verne and the Discovery of the Natural World / Tim Unwin -- Jules Verne’s Transylvania: Cartographic Omissions / Anca Mitroi -- Undermining Body and Mind? The Impact of the Underground in Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature / Kiera Vaclavik -- Alfred Jarry’s Neo-Science: Liquidizing Paris and Debunking Verne / Ben Fisher -- Reading Environmental Apocalypse in J.-H. Rosny Aîné’s Terrestrial Texts / Louise Lyle -- André Gide, Eugène Rouart and le retour à la terre / David H. Walker -- Down to Earth: André Malraux’s Political Itinerary and the Natural World / Martin Hurcombe -- Index of Names.