12
rary earth sciences in order to elaborate their often utopian
political projects or imaginative fictions, especially in the
popular genre of the novel;
iii.)
how the latter part of the nineteenth century greatly intensified and diversified the exploitation of the discourses of
the earth sciences, with geological figures informing very
different aspects of French culture, from children’s literature to avant-garde aesthetics, culminating in the popular
science-fiction of Jules Verne;
iv.)
the early twentieth century marked a further shift in the
relation between earth sciences and broader French culture, a shift that encouraged writers, specifically the figure
of the “intellectuel”, on the one hand to engage critically
with the latest technology employed to exploit the earth’s
resources and on the other to problematize any ideological
attachment to the “soil” of la patrie.
This is clearly not a history of the development of earth sciences
in France or in western Europe since the mid-eighteenth century. Excellent studies on this have already been written by Martin J. S.
Rudwick, David Oldroyd, Gabriel Gohau and Barbara Kennedy
among others.
1 It is, rather, a cultural history of the uses to which
earth sciences, their concepts, figures and fields of knowledge have
been put by contemporary French writers and thinkers. It does, however, employ historical parameters: roughly speaking, 1740 to 1940.
The reason for this chronological range is that it marks out a paradigm
in French thinking about the Earth. It starts with the conceptual move
away from the speculative mechanist models of Descartes and his followers in understanding geological phenomena towards the so-called
“Neptunist” theories of writers such as Buffon, and the less well___________________________
1 See in particular Martin J. S. Rudwick’s magisterial Bursting the Limits of Time: The
Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), as well as his The New Science of Geology: Studies in
The Earth Sciences in the Age of Revolution (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); see also
David R. Oldroyd, Thinking about the Earth: A History of Ideas in Geology (London:
Athlone, 1996), Gabriel Gohau, Histoire de la géologie (Paris: Éditions de la Découverte, 1987), and Barbara Kennedy, Inventing the Earth: Ideas on Landscape Development since 1740 (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).
rary earth sciences in order to elaborate their often utopian
political projects or imaginative fictions, especially in the
popular genre of the novel;
iii.)
how the latter part of the nineteenth century greatly intensified and diversified the exploitation of the discourses of
the earth sciences, with geological figures informing very
different aspects of French culture, from children’s literature to avant-garde aesthetics, culminating in the popular
science-fiction of Jules Verne;
iv.)
the early twentieth century marked a further shift in the
relation between earth sciences and broader French culture, a shift that encouraged writers, specifically the figure
of the “intellectuel”, on the one hand to engage critically
with the latest technology employed to exploit the earth’s
resources and on the other to problematize any ideological
attachment to the “soil” of la patrie.
This is clearly not a history of the development of earth sciences
in France or in western Europe since the mid-eighteenth century. Excellent studies on this have already been written by Martin J. S.
Rudwick, David Oldroyd, Gabriel Gohau and Barbara Kennedy
among others.
1 It is, rather, a cultural history of the uses to which
earth sciences, their concepts, figures and fields of knowledge have
been put by contemporary French writers and thinkers. It does, however, employ historical parameters: roughly speaking, 1740 to 1940.
The reason for this chronological range is that it marks out a paradigm
in French thinking about the Earth. It starts with the conceptual move
away from the speculative mechanist models of Descartes and his followers in understanding geological phenomena towards the so-called
“Neptunist” theories of writers such as Buffon, and the less well___________________________
1 See in particular Martin J. S. Rudwick’s magisterial Bursting the Limits of Time: The
Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), as well as his The New Science of Geology: Studies in
The Earth Sciences in the Age of Revolution (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); see also
David R. Oldroyd, Thinking about the Earth: A History of Ideas in Geology (London:
Athlone, 1996), Gabriel Gohau, Histoire de la géologie (Paris: Éditions de la Découverte, 1987), and Barbara Kennedy, Inventing the Earth: Ideas on Landscape Development since 1740 (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).