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• W2023194470 abstract "Reviewed by: The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856 Sharon Ruston The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856. By Ralph O'Connor. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2007. ISBN 0 226 61668 1. Pp. xiii + 541. £26.50. This book is utterly brilliant. Ralph O'Connor's argument, in brief, is that 'science, a group of practices defined against the imagination, was promoted in literary texts using imaginative techniques'. This should not be such a challenging notion, though it clearly still is, and a contentious one at that. O'Connor's main subject is geology and by the end of the book it is proved that a template for writing about geology first emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Throughout, we repeatedly see evidence of the patchwork of well-worn poetic quotation, allusions to visual and dramatic spectacle, mythology and visions of apocalypse that successfully popularised geology. Byron looms large in this study and often his visions of a world long past are appropriated, re-interpreted and creatively altered by men of science writing about the antediluvian past. [End Page 91] As befits a book that reflects on the rhetorical and literary style of scientific writing, O'Connor's own exposition is suitably poetic itself ('geological writings […] were windows into a brave new world richer than romance'). This book is readable, fun and, despite its immense size (it is a beast of a book, but a modern one at that), it is a page-turner. The author is expert in the discipline of literary criticism as much as in history of science, and in the epilogue to the book there is a plea for a greater connection to be made between the two. Declaring that he intends to look at science as literature, O'Connor's study examines not simply what geologists communicated to the public but how this information was communicated. O'Connor is better than many literary scholars at the close analysis of texts: not simply in his attention to genre and the many interesting forms of generic hybridity that writing on geology used, but also in his interest in words. It is all too easy to ignore the poetic epigraph used to open a chapter of any book with its marginal position in relation to the main text, or to skim over an author's quotation after noting that it is yet another example of the long-lasting influence of Milton or Byron. Particularly in his discussion of the textual accompaniments to visual shows, O'Connor examines these quotations with the attention they deserve – finding that they are used to 'elicit rehearsed responses' – and looks into the mechanics of how they work. We discover in their reappearance through a century of writing on geology that such quotations have not only attained canonical status in these genres, but that they have also acquired a significance and authority not present in the original. In O'Connor's reading, the poet thus becomes the geologist and poetry lends the text the authority it needs. The alteration of the original poetic text, such as changing the tenses of verbs or even the words themselves, is part of this process. O'Connor does not regard this activity as misquotation but as both a deliberate and an inventive practice. Geology in its infancy needed the gravitas afforded by poetry; poetry could lend a degree of legitimacy to geology's potentially controversial message. As part of his project O'Connor has to grapple with, carefully divest or re-invest contemporary terms with their appropriate significance: 'literature' and 'Romanticism' are no exceptions (neither, indeed, are 'scientist' and 'dinosaur'). He is also alive to the changed definitions of terms such as 'curious', 'curiosity' and 'interesting'. O'Connor wishes to return to the idea 'not that science writing and literature enjoyed a fruitful relationship, but that scientific writing was literature' and he means 'literature' here as a 'more inclusive concept', used, as it was in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to include 'scientific and historical writing as well'. He is always admirably careful in his own terminology, and critical of those who..." @default.
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• W2023194470 title "<i>The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802–1856</i> (review)" @default.
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