Articulate Fossils: Reading Extinction with Victorian Literature and Science

Abstract

This dissertation argues that extinction was explored as a literary project in Victorian literature and science. This intervention primarily rethinks two issues: first, the tendency to view discourses of extinction, as it was developing in the 19th century, predominantly as scientific discourses in service of reinforcing imperial ideology; second, the tendency within contemporary ecocritical and philosophical thought to associate extinction too readily with a sense of finality. This dissertation contends that 19th-century discussions around extinction were conceptually diverse and formally experimental. It is attuned to the ways in which contentions around extinction (whether biblical, evolutionary, imperial, or gendered) turn to literary forms as ways of organizing knowledge and in which literary forms (particularly the novel and natural history writing) work to bring relevance to the unthinkable event of extinction. Revisiting the fossil as a hermeneutic object, this dissertation turns to fossils of extinct creatures and to the history of their reading as an attempt to develop a literary genealogy that foregrounds historical responses towards extinction as enduring and urgent modes of knowledge. The first half of the dissertation, “Fossils in Nature,” examines three naturalists and their use of the metaphorological model of the book of nature to comprehend, contest, and reframe the reality of extinction. My first chapter examines Philip Henry Gosse’s Omphalos and argues that Gosse uses biblical typology as a quasi-scientific method to set extinct and living species within a typological narrative structure that works to transform what was real into what ought to be meaningful. My second chapter turns to Hugh Miller’s Old Red Sandstone to examine how he conceives of fossil records as things of the earth—artifacts displaced between art and nature, text and stone—to counteract their disappearance into the abstraction of language. My third chapter showcases how memory affords the Anglo-Argentine naturalist William Henry Hudson the literary means to encode extinction as an invisible event displaced by the imperial metropolis. The second half of my dissertation, “Fossils in the Novel,” examines extinction as a formal condition that subtends a story’s legibility by reworking its sign system, scale, and narrative. My fourth chapter centers on the geological (un)consciousness in Dracula, and works to unravel an extinction imaginary that acknowledges extinction’s relevance as both a geological and a literary event. My final chapter explores how Olive Schreiner in From Man to Man adopts two scientific theories about extinction—catastrophism and uniformitarianism—as complementary rather than contesting plots to write an evolutionary history of the New Woman.