Dana Luciano, <i>How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth-Century United States</i>

Geology emerges as something like the science of the nineteenth century, more so than biology or psychology, as Dana Luciano reads things in How the Earth Feels.That is above all because of the philosophical and existential consequences of geological temporality for modernity.Geology introduced or, minimally, reinforced a cluster of ruptures that defined modernity.It made clear to all Westerners that the Earth's history is much longer than Judeo-Christian lore proposed, so much longer that, while not coinciding with infinity, it almost escaped the ability of the finite mind to grasp its duration.It also made clear, at least as of Charles Lyell, that the Earth is changeable, that rocks mutate, that pebbles are transformed, and that not only islands but also continents might come and go.Via Georges Cuvier, it also introduced the possibility that life on the Earth had started many times over, that various species, due to diverse catastrophes, were gone, and that humans might be late-comers in this series of creations, or (as Ishmael speculated in Moby-Dick [1851]) its early leavers; that it wasn't made especially for humans by a God finding favor with them.The Earth, therefore, emerged as unstable and finite, whereas to the humans pondering that fragility, the temporality of the Earth seemed incomprehensibly long.Among the variety of uncertainties that geological philosophies engendered as of the late eighteenth century, arguably the most important, for Luciano, is the Earth's antiquity.That longevity grounds the idea of geological fantasy, the concept on which most of her arguments are founded.