Overview
- The first single-author, book-length examination of Tennyson and geology
- Reaches further than the current trend of historical contextualisation of literature and science to offer new ways of approaching the study incorporating literary critical theory
- Addresses multi-disciplinary subject matter and in its critical approach
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine (PLSM)
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Table of contents (6 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
This book offers new interpretations of Tennyson’s major poems along-side contemporary geology, and specifically Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-3). Employing various approaches – from close readings of both the poetic and geological texts, historical contextualisation and the application of Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism – the book demonstrates not only the significance of geology for Tennyson’s poetry, but the vital import of Tennyson’s poetics in explicating the implications of geology for the nineteenth century and beyond. Gender ideologies in The Princess (1847) are read via High Miller’s geology, while the writings of Lyell and other contemporary geologist, comparative anatomists and language theorists are examined along-side In Memoriam (1851) and Maud (1855). The book argues that Tennyson’s experimentation with Lyell’s geology produced a remarkable ‘uniformitarian’ poetics that is best understood via Bakhtinian theory; a poetics that reveals the seminal role methodologies in geology played in the development of divisions between science and culture, and that also, quite profoundly, anticipates the crisis in language later associated with the linguistic turn of the twentieth century.
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Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Tennyson and Geology
Book Subtitle: Poetry and Poetics
Authors: Michelle Geric
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66110-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-66109-4Published: 18 January 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-88178-2Published: 04 June 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-66110-0Published: 13 December 2017
Series ISSN: 2634-6435
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6443
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 219
Topics: Nineteenth-Century Literature