Excavating Victorians

Resource Information

The work Excavating Victorians represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Sydney Jones Library, University of Liverpool. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Excavating Victorians

Statement of responsibility

Virginia Zimmerman

Creator

• Zimmerman, Virginia
• Zimmerman, Virginia

Subject

• English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism
• Geology in literature
• Literature and history -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century
• Literature and science -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century
• Space and time in literature
• Time -- Philosophy
• Archaeology in literature
• Authors, English -- 19th century -- Philosophy

Language

eng

Summary

"Excavating Victorians examines nineteenth-century Britain's reaction to the revelations about time and natural history provided by the new sciences of geology and archaeology. The Victorians faced one of the greatest paradigm shifts in history: the bottom dropped out of time, and they had to reinvent their relationship to the earth and to time and history. These new sciences took the Victorians by storm, inundating them with fossils, skeletal remains, and potsherds - artifacts, or traces, that served at once as relics from the past, objects in the present, and markers of time's passage. Virginia Zimmerman explores how the Victorians utilized a nexus of literature, excavation, and reflections on time to ease anxieties about the individual's fate in the face of time's overwhelming expanse. The function of artifacts is also considered through careful readings of Tennyson's The Princess and Dickens's Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend. Zimmerman shows how these literary works make use of the language, tropes, and even generic conventions of excavation, and how they participate in the effort to rescue the individual from temporal insignificance."--BOOK JACKET

Member of

• State University of New York, SUNY series, Studies in the long nineteenth century

Cataloging source

DLC

Government publication

government publication of a state province territory dependency etc

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

LC call number

PR468.G38

LC item number

Z56 2008

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography

Series statement

SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century