| ISBN |
9780791472798 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
| 0791472795 (hardcover : alk. paper) |
| Author |
Zimmerman, Virginia |
| Title |
Excavating Victorians / Virginia Zimmerman. |
| Publisher and/or associated date/s |
Albany : State University of New York Press, c2008. |
| Description |
x, 231 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. |
| Series |
SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century |
| SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (p. 207-223) and index. |
| 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. |
| 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."--BOOK JACKET. |
| Subjects |
English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism |
| Geology in literature |
| Archaeology in literature |
| Space and time in literature |
| Time -- Philosophy |
| Authors, English -- 19th century -- Philosophy |
| Literature and science -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century |
| Literature and history -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century |
| Call number |
930.1 ZIM |
