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Deep Time : A Literary History by Noah Heringman is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Deep Time : A Literary History about?

**How the concept of “deep time” began as a metaphor used by philosophers, poets, and naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries** In this interdisciplinary book, Noah Heringman argues that the concept of “deep time”—most often associated with geological epochs—began as a metaphorical language used by philosophers, poets, and naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to explore the origins of life beyond the written record. Their ideas about “the abyss of time” created a way to think about the prehistoric before it was possible to assign dates to the fossil record. Heringman, examining stories about the deep past by visionary thinkers ranging from William Blake to Charles Darwin, challenges the conventional wisdom that the idea of deep time came forth fully formed from the modern science of geology. Instead, he argues, it has a rich imaginative history. Heringman considers Johann Reinhold Forster and Georg Forster, naturalists on James Cook’s second voyage around the world, who, inspired by encounters with Pacific islanders, connected the scale of geological time to human origins and cultural evolution; Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who drew on tr

Who reads Deep Time : A Literary History?

Author

Noah Heringman

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published

2023

Language

EN

ISBN

9780691236773

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Literary Fiction, History, Nature