Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology by Adelene Buckland

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Novel Science is the first in-depth study of the shocking, groundbreaking, and sometimes beautiful writings of the gentlemen of the "heroic age" of geology and of the contribution these men made to the literary culture of their day. For these men, literature was an essential part of the practice of science itself, as important to their efforts as mapmaking, fieldwork, and observation. The reading and writing of imaginative literatures helped them to discover, imagine, debate, and give shape show more and meaning to millions of years of previously undiscovered earth history. Borrowing from the historical fictions of Walter Scott and the poetry of Lord Byron, they invented geology as a science, discovered many of the creatures we now call the dinosaurs, and were the first to unravel and map the sequence and structure of stratified rock. As Adelene Buckland shows, they did this by rejecting the grand narratives of older theories of the earth or of biblical cosmogony: theirs would be a humble science, faithfully recording minute details and leaving the big picture for future generations to paint. Buckland also reveals how these scientists-just as they had drawn inspiration from their literary predecessors-gave Victorian realist novelists such as George Eliot, Charles Kingsley, and Charles Dickens a powerful language with which to create dark and disturbing ruptures in the too-seductive sweep of story. show less

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Stevil2001 2,721 reviews

This fits comfortably into the "x and literature" model of Victorian literary criticism, where x is a scientific discipline: geology, in this case. Buckland explores how geology itself is a narrative, arguing, "there can be no meaningful distinction between science and literature, since writing can be (though it is not restricted to being) a mode of scientific practice" (26). I think that's overstating the case a bit, but Buckland's mission is, in my view, to show how literary narratives appear in geology, and how geological narratives appear in literature.

It's not the easiest read, even for literary criticism it's dense and obscure. I liked Buckland's discussions of the influence of Sir Walter Scott on nineteenth-century geology, and I show more really appreciated her clear delineation of what Charles Lyell and his colleagues actually believed (she argues the "catastrophist"/"uniformitarian" divide was exaggerated).

In these kind of books, I'm always much more interested in the literature than the science, and I much appreciated a thorough discussion of Charles Kingsley, moreso than I can remember seeing anywhere else. Everyone loves to talk about The Water-Babies, but (like me) Buckland recognizes his other writing has a lot to offer those interested in science, and provides extended readings of Glaucus, Alton Locke, Yeast, and Two Years Ago. I'm very familiar with the last of those; now I must get around to the first three. I'm also very curious about the scientist romance Wooers and Winners by Isabella Banks that she discusses.

I found her interpretations of Charlotte Brontë and Dickens less interesting, because I think the novels she discusses are less obviously about geology than the ones by Kingsley, and thus she's more doing the "but novel y is secretly about science x!" move that I'm a bit skeptical of. She kind of admits that, though, when she says Dickens knew science through its showmen: thus his science was visual, not textual.

A decent book if you like this kind of approach to literature and science. show less

Jul 7, 2017

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