How the Earth Feels

“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

"How the Earth Feels helps us to identify the histories of thought that continue to structure, encircle, and limit our ways of being and our efforts to reckon with both the non-human world and the precarity of individual species across deep time. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in various fields, including the history of science, critical race studies, feminist studies, and environmental humanities. I twill also be of interest to anyone open to feeling the ground move beneath and around them." - Melissa Gniadek, Revue Française d’Études Américaines

"Uncovering this urgently relevant history, How the Earth Feels will appeal to scholars of early and nineteenth-century American literature, science studies, environmental humanities, temporality studies, gender and sexuality studies, new materialism, critical race, and decolonial studies." - Abby Goode, Early American Literature