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Darwin, Concepción, and the Geological Sublime

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2012

Paul White
Paul White*
Affiliation:
Darwin Correspondence Project and Department of History and Philosophy of ScienceUniversity of Cambridge E-mail: psw24@cam.ac.uk
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Argument

Darwin's narrative of the earthquake at Concepción, set within the frameworks of Lyellian uniformitarianism, romantic aesthetics, and the emergence of geology as a popular science, is suggestive of the role of the sublime in geological enquiry and theory in the early nineteenth century. Darwin's Beagle diary and later notebooks and publications show that the aesthetic of the sublime was both a form of representing geology to a popular audience, and a crucial structure for the observation and recording of the event from the beginning. The awesome spectacle of the earthquake proved in turn the magnitude of the forces at stake in earth history, and helped to make geology an epic conjoining the history of civilization with the history of the earth.

Type
Research Article
Information
Science in Context , Volume 25 , Issue 1: Witness to Disaster: Earthquakes and Expertise in Comparative Perspective , March 2012 , pp. 49 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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