How the Earth Feels

Dana Luciano is Associate Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University and author of Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America.

• Acknowledgments  ixIntroduction. The “Fashionable Science”  11. “The Infinite Go-Before of the Present”: Geological Time, Worldmaking, and Race in the Nineteenth Century  312. Unsettled Ground: Indigenous Prophecy, Geological Fantasy, and the New Madrid Earthquakes  573. Romancing the Trace: Ichnology, Affect, Matter  874. Matters of Spirit: Vibrant Materiality and White Femme Geophilia  1145. The Natural History of Freedom: Blackness, Geomorphology, Worldmaking  137Coda. Ishmael’s Anthropocene: Geological Fantasy in the Twenty-First Century  171Notes  181Bibliography  211Index

“Tracking the strange pleasures and anxieties around geologic thinking in literary texts, popular culture, and scientific disciplines, Dana Luciano beautifully renders how time is felt and experienced at different scales and intensities. Her account of how biopolitics underwrote the pleasingly terrifying view of deep time as expressed by the fossil record is a signature accomplishment. How the Earth Feels makes a stunningly original contribution. I savored every sentence in this book.” - Stephanie Foote, author of (The Parvenu's Plot: Gender, Culture, and Class in the Age of Realism) “This wide-ranging book takes geology as nothing less than the foundation of modernity, a form of world-making extending from the nineteenth century to our own time, featuring the giddy fantasies of racism and colonialism as much as the rigors of a new science. Empiricism and materialism double here as biopolitics. Clear-eyed, lucid, timely.” - Wai Chee Dimock, author of (Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival) "In this compellingly argued and beautifully written monograph, Luciano (Rutgers Univ.) discusses 19th-century scientific and literary writings about the emerging field of geology as a rigorous field of inquiry. . . . Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals." - D. J. Rosenthal (Choice) "[How the Earth Feels] is not only an original contribution to the environmental humanities and American cultural history, offering a detailed exploration of the relationship between science and society in the nineteenth century, but it also provides essential insights for scholars engaged with the Anthropocene today." - Amanda Halter (Amerikastudien)