Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T00:47:20.097Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

H. G. WELLS, GEOLOGY, AND THE RUINS OF TIME

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2017

David Shackleton*
Affiliation:
St Catherine's College, Oxford.

Extract

H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) has hitherto been read in two principal scientific contexts: those of evolutionary biology and thermodynamic physics. Numerous critics have situated the romance in the context of evolutionary biology and contemporary discourses of degeneration (McLean 11–40; Greenslade 32–41). Others have discussed it in the context of thermodynamic physics. For instance, Bruce Clarke has read The Time Machine as “a virtual allegory of classical thermodynamics,” and shows that its combination of physical and social entropy reflects a wider transfer within the period of concepts and metaphors from physical science to social discourses of degeneration (121–26). Neatly linking these scientific contexts with issues of form, Michael Sayeau has argued that the social and physical entropy that are themes of the romance are reflected in its narrative structure, which manifests a type of narrative entropy, and thereby raises the spectre of the end of fiction (109–46).

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Beer, Gillian. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Bonney, T. G. The Story of our Planet. London: Cassell, 1893.Google Scholar
Buckland, Adelene. Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2013.Google Scholar
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 2nd ed. London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1759.Google Scholar
Clarke, Bruce. Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001.Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray, 1859.Google Scholar
Dean, Dennis. Tennyson and Geology. Lincoln: Tennyson Society, 1985.Google Scholar
Geduld, Harry M.Introduction.” The Definitive Time Machine: A Critical Edition of H. G. Wells's Scientific Romance. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987. 127.Google Scholar
Greenslade, William. Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Gregory, R. A. and Wells, H. G.. Honours Physiography. London: Joseph Hughes, 1893.Google Scholar
Heringman, Noah. Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004.Google Scholar
Hovanec, Caroline. “Rereading H. G. Wells's The Time Machine: Empiricism, Aestheticism, Modernism.” ELT 58.44 (2015): 459–85.Google Scholar
Hutton, James. Theory of the Earth, with Proofs and Illustrations. Vol. 1. Edinburgh: William Creech, 1795.Google Scholar
James, Simon J. Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity, and the End of Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012.Google Scholar
Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lyell, Charles. A Manual of Elementary Geology: Or, the Ancient Changes of the Earth and its Inhabitants as Illustrated by Geological Monuments. 3rd ed. London: John Murray, 1851.Google Scholar
Lyell, Charles. Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface, by Reference to Causes Now in Operation. Vol. 1. London: John Murray, 1830.Google Scholar
McConnell, Frank. The Science Fiction of H. G. Wells. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1981.Google Scholar
McLean, Steven. The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells: Fantasies of Science. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.Google Scholar
Murchison, Roderick. The Silurian System. Vol. 1. London: John Murray, 1839.Google Scholar
O'Connor, Ralph. The Earth on Show: Fossils and the Poetics of Popular Science, 1802-1856. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007.Google Scholar
Owen, Richard. Geology and Inhabitants of the Ancient World. London: Crystal Palace Library, 1854.Google Scholar
Parrinder, Patrick. “From Rome to Richmond: Wells, Universal History, and Prophetic Time.” H. G. Wells's Perennial Time Machine. Ed. Slusser, George et al. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2001. 110–21.Google Scholar
Parrinder, Patrick. Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Playfair, John. “Biographical Account of the Late Dr James Hutton, F. R. S. Edin.” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 5.3 (1805): 3999.Google Scholar
Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Vol. 1. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.Google Scholar
Roberts, R. D. The Earth's History: An Introduction to Modern Geology. London: John Murray, 1893.Google Scholar
Rudwick, Martin J. S. Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005.Google Scholar
Rudwick, Martin J. S.The Strategy of Lyell's Principles of Geology .” Isis 61.1 (Spring 1970): 533.Google Scholar
Rudwick, Martin J. S. Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008.Google Scholar
Sayeau, Michael. Against the Event: The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013.Google Scholar
Secord, James A.Introduction.” Principles of Geology by Lyell, Charles. London: Penguin, 1997. ix-xliii.Google Scholar
Tennyson, Alfred. In Memoriam. Ed. Shatto, Susan and Shaw, Marion. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1982.Google Scholar
Thomson, William. “On a Universal Tendency in Nature to the Dissipation of Mechanical Energy.” Mathematical and Physical Papers. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1882. 511–14.Google Scholar
Ure, Andrew. A New System of Geology. London: Longman et al., 1829.Google Scholar
Wells, H. G. The Definitive Time Machine: A Critical Edition of H. G. Wells's Scientific Romance. Ed. Geduld, Harry M.. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Wells, H. G. The Discovery of the Future. London: T. Fischer Unwin, 1902.Google Scholar
Wells, H. G. Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction. Ed. Philmus, Robert M. and Hughes, David Y.. Berkeley: U of California P, 1975.Google Scholar
Wells, H. G. Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866). Vol. 1. Victor Gollancz and The Cresset Press, 1934.Google Scholar
Wells, H. G.Reminiscences of a Planet.” Pall Mall Gazette 58.8990 (1894): 4.Google Scholar
Wells, H. G. The Time Machine. Ed. Parrinder, Patrick. London: Penguin, 2005.Google Scholar
Willis, Martin. Vision, Science and Literature, 1870–1920: Ocular Horizons. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011.Google Scholar
Zimmerman, Virginia. Excavating Victorians. Albany: State U of New York P, 2008.Google Scholar