Excavating Victorians / Virginia Zimmerman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Zimmerman, Virginia, author.

Series:

SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century

SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century Excavating Victorians

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature and science--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Literature and science.

Literature and history--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Literature and history.

English literature--19th century--History and criticism.

English literature.

Authors, English--19th century--Philosophy.

Authors, English.

Time--Philosophy.

Time.

Space and time in literature.

Geology in literature.

Archaeology in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 231 p. ) ill. ;

Place of Publication:

Albany, New York State : State University of New York Press, [2008]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Excavating Victorians examines nineteenth-century Britain's reaction to the revelations about time and natural history provided by the new sciences of geology and archaeology. The Victorians faced one of the greatest paradigm shifts in history: the bottom dropped out of time, and they had to reinvent their relationship to the earth and to time and history. These new sciences took the Victorians by storm, inundating them with fossils, skeletal remains, and potsherds—artifacts, or traces, that served at once as relics from the past, objects in the present, and markers of time's passage. Virginia Zimmerman explores how the Victorians utilized a nexus of literature, excavation, and reflections on time to ease anxieties about the individual's fate in the face of time's overwhelming expanse. The function of artifacts is also considered through careful readings of Tennyson's The Princess and Dickens's Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend. Zimmerman shows how these literary works make use of the language, tropes, and even generic conventions of excavation, and how they participate in the effort to rescue the individual from temporal insignificance.

Contents:

Introduction: "all relics here together"

The Victorian geologist: reading remains and writing time

Tennyson's fairy tale of science

Accidental archaeology in London and Pompeii

Dickens among the ruins

Final fragments.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [207]-223) and index.

ISBN:

9780791479230

0791479234

9781435632974

1435632974