Histoires de la terre. earth sciences and french culture 1740-1940: 322 (Faux Titre) - Softcover

This collection of essays explores how Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment developments in the earth sciences and related fields (paleontology, mining, archeology, seismology, oceanography, evolution, etc.) impacted on contemporary French culture. They reveal that geological ideas were a much more pervasive and influential cultural force than has hitherto been supposed. From the mid-eighteenth century, with the publication of Buffon’s seminal Théorie de la Terre (1749), until the early twentieth century, concepts and figures drawn from the earth sciences inspired some of the most important French philosophers, novelists, political theorists, historians and popularizers of science of the time. This book charts the original and influential ways in which French writers and thinkers, such as Buffon, d’Holbach, Balzac, Sand, Verne, Gide and Malraux, exploited the earth sciences for very different ends. This volume will be of interest to students, researchers and scholars of French literature in the modern period, cultural historians of modern France, scholars of European studies, of French political history, of the History of Ideas or the History of Science as well as researchers in landscape and physical geography.

Louise Lyle is Lecturer in French at the University of London Institute in Paris. She researches and has published on the interface of science and literature in fin-de-siecle France, specifically the use of social Darwinism in this period. David McCallam is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Sheffield, UK. He is author of Chamfort and the French Revolution (Oxford, 2002) and L'Art de l'equivoque chez Laclos (Geneva, 2008), as well as of a number of articles on late eighteenth-century French volcanology.