Histoires de la Terre

Earth Sciences and French Culture 1740-1940
Erscheinungsjahr 2008
ISBN: 978-90-420-2477-9
Verlag: Brill | Rodopi

Buch, Französisch, Band 322, 272 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 435 g

Reihe: Faux Titre

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

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Lyle, Louise

McCallam, David

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein Historische Geographie, Landkarten & Atlanten
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Formalen Wissenschaften & Technik
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Wissenschafts- und Universitätsgeschichte
• Geowissenschaften Geographie | Raumplanung Humangeographie Historische Geographie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Romanische Literaturen Französische Literatur
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften: Allgemeines Geschichte der Human- und Sozialwissenschaften
• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Current Affairs
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Louise LYLE and David MCCALLAM: Introduction
Section 1: The Enlightenment
Benoît DE BAERE: Natural Catastrophe in Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle: Earth Science, Aesthetics, Anthropology
Grégory QUENET: When Geology Encounters a Real Catastrophe: From Theoretical Earthquakes to the Lisbon Disaster
Rebecca FORD: Images of the Earth, Images of Man: The Mineralogical Plates of the Encyclopédie
Ian D. ROTHERHAM and David MCCALLAM: Peat Bogs, Marshes and Fen as Disputed Landscapes in Late Eighteenth-Century France and England
Section 2: Early to Mid-Nineteenth Century
Greg KERR: “Nous avons enlacé le globe de nos réseaux…”: Spatial Structure in Saint-Simonian Poetics
Ceri CROSSLEY: Pierre Leroux and the Circulus: Soil, Socialism and Salvation in Nineteenth-Century France
Scott SPRENGER: Mind as Ruin: Balzac’s “Sarrasine” and the Archaeology of Self
Claire LE GUILLOU: Archaeology – A Passion of George Sand
Section 3: Late Nineteenth Century
Tim UNWIN: Jules Verne and the Discovery of the Natural World
Anca MITROI: Jules Verne’s Transylvania: Cartographic Omissions
Kiera VACLAVIK: Undermining Body and Mind? The Impact of the Underground in Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature
Ben FISHER: Alfred Jarry’s Neo-Science: Liquidizing Paris and Debunking Verne
Section 4: Early Twentieth Century
Louise LYLE: Reading Environmental Apocalypse in J.-H. Rosny Aîné’s Terrestrial Texts
David H. WALKER: André Gide, Eugène Rouart and le retour à la terre
Martin HURCOMBE: Down to Earth: André Malraux’s Political Itinerary and the Natural World
Index of Names

Über Autor(innen)

Louise Lyle is Lecturer in French at the University of London Institute in Paris. She researches and has published on the interface of science and literature in fin-de-siècle France, specifically the use of social Darwinism in this period. David McCallam is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Sheffield, UK. He is author of Chamfort and the French Revolution (Oxford, 2002) and L’Art de l’équivoque chez Laclos (Geneva, 2008), as well as of a number of articles on late eighteenth-century French volcanology.