McAllister, David (2024) Geology, the imagination, and speculative writing: Gideon Mantell’s fossil poetry in Anna Birkbeck’s album. 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 2024 (36), ISSN 1755-1560.
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Abstract
This article considers the literary and scientific significance of a poem written by the geologist Gideon Mantell in Anna Birkbeck’s album in 1825. ‘On a Group of Organic Remains of a Former World’ considers a cluster of fossils and asks them to give up information about the prehistoric world in which they had lived. Mantell’s speaker is particularly keen to discover whether a race of angelic beings might have inhabited earth before the biblical creation, as this would help to explain why no fossilized human remains had been found by geologists who had discovered innumerable other creatures buried in the rocks. This article considers why Mantell was interested in these questions, why he chose poetry as the best form in which to explore them, and what his contribution to Anna Birkbeck’s album tells us about the imbrication of scientific and literary writing in the Romantic era.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | geology, fossils, Mantell, deep time, dinosaurs, albums, science and literature, poetry and science, Byron |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Nineteenth-Century Studies, Centre for |
| Depositing User: | Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 26 Nov 2024 13:48 |
| Last Modified: | 26 Nov 2024 15:07 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/54601 |
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