Ecocene: Cappadocia journal of environmental humanities, Dec 28, 2022
This essay investigates ecological epiphany in short stories by Zadie Smith and Joyce Carol Oates... more This essay investigates ecological epiphany in short stories by Zadie Smith and Joyce Carol Oates, moments in which characters confront the link between their own consumption habits and planetary damage. These moments build on a longer literary history of epiphany in modern fiction, a history that foregrounds suddenness, physicality, and the mundane, but these short stories also adapt epiphany to address prominent concerns about anthropogenic climate change in the twenty-first century. Through close readings of Smith’s “The Dialectic” (2019), Smith’s “The Lazy River” (2017), and Oates’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (2019), I show how these stories’ ecological epiphanies invite the reader to emotionally confront the urgency of the climate crisis and to take action. While important arguments by Amitav Ghosh and Rob Nixon argue that literature must make planetary crisis visible, Smith’s and Oates’s short stories suggest that some contemporary writers now face a different issue, not a need to heighten the visibility of the damage, but rather a need to psychologically confront its terrible obviousness.
In her 1895 poem "Spring in the Alps," Mathilde Blind celebrates the joyful, unapologetic queerne... more In her 1895 poem "Spring in the Alps," Mathilde Blind celebrates the joyful, unapologetic queerness of dandelions:
The dandelion puffs her balls, Free spinsters of the air, Who scorn to wait for beetle calls Or bees to find them fair; But breaking through the painted walls Their sisters tamely bear, Fly off in dancing down, which falls And sprouts up everywhere.
(ll. 17–24)1 Through these anthropomorphized "spinsters," Blind merges two different accounts of reproduction from Charles Darwin's works. The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868) discusses spontaneous plant budding, while The Descent of Man (1871) describes how male animals vie for females' attention through display, dance, and song.2 Yet here, on this "lusty green" (l. 2), it is the spinster dandelion who "puffs her balls" in display, not to solicit a mate's attention, but for her own pleasure. The seeds "Fly off in dancing down" in language that hints at Darwin's male suitors, but heterosexual reproduction is not the aim of this performance. The poem uncovers the queer possibilities of nature, possibilities that celebrate nonreproductive desire while defying, even "scorn[ing]," the male / female binary found in the Descent.
Blind joins her late Victorian contemporaries Constance Naden and Laurence Hope in crafting a Darwinian poetics that draws on evolution and [End Page 97] sexual selection to uncover nature's queer possibilities. While the traffic of Darwin's ideas with misogynistic and homophobic rhetoric is well known, less attention has been paid to how his theories could also unsettle conventional accounts of gender, sexuality, and reproductive teleology.3 In this essay, I mean "queer" in Holly Furneaux's sense of "that which differs from the life-script of opposite-sex marriage and reproduction."4 All three poets lived lives that challenged this life script. Blind and Naden were both New Women who never married.5 Laurence Hope, less well known among literature and science scholars, was the pen name of Adela Florence Nicolson, wife of a colonel in the Bengal Army. She scandalized her contemporaries with her erotic verse and disregard of feminine modesty, and would dress herself—problematically—as a Pashtun boy in order to follow her husband out on his military campaigns.6
For these three poets, male pseudonyms were a means of crossing gender lines and facilitating publication. Blind wrote under "Claude Lake" for her first volume of poetry and Naden sometimes used "C. Arden" or "C.A." for her scientific writing.7 Nicolson kept the pseudonym Laurence Hope even after its status as a pseudonym was likely known.8 And all three poets worked with intertexts that explored ideas about gender and sexuality, especially a tradition of evolutionary verse that included works by Alfred Tennyson and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Hope's poetry also takes inspiration from bhakti verse, a tradition of Hindu devotional poetry that, as Rohit K. Dasgupta and Rima Bhattacharya have shown, challenges heterosexual norms.9 Together, their late-century scientific poems offer a testimony to the imaginative possibilities of Darwin's ideas, ideas that they used to decenter heterosexual marriage and to imagine a more gender-inclusive present.
This article argues that George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) aligns natural catastrophe w... more This article argues that George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) aligns natural catastrophe with the image of the disastrous female body in order to challenge contemporary geological readings of nature as a balanced, self-regulating domain. Both incorporating and revising the work of Charles Lyell, Oliver Goldsmith, and Georges Cuvier, Eliot emphasises the interconnectedness of human and planetary processes, feminises environmental catastrophe, and blends human and ecological history. She does so in order to write the human presence back into geological histories that tended to evacuate the human, and to invite readers to account for the effects their lifestyles and industries have upon the supposedly balanced and orderly processes of nature.
Aurora Leigh is a political poem because it is a physical poem. While feminist critics of the 197... more Aurora Leigh is a political poem because it is a physical poem. While feminist critics of the 1970s and 1980s celebrated the work’s vividly embodied imagery, a more recent critical interest in the so-called Spasmodic school of poetry, with its focus on sensations, rhythms, and pulses, has further emphasized the central role of women’s physical experience in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s epic.1 Such analyses magnify Aurora’s desire to craft a poetry that will express her own “full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age.”2 And yet this same emphasis on the body also fuels the poem’s internal dismissal of women’s poetry. In Book II, the central male antagonist, Romney Leigh, points to Aurora’s body as an obstacle to political expression. Catching the young Aurora in the act of crowning herself as a poet, Romney insists that women cannot write about contemporary debates over labor or slavery because they understand everything in terms of their own experience: “All’s yours and you, / All, coloured with your blood, or otherwise / Just nothing to you” (II.196–198). In a powerfully essentializing gesture, Romney invalidates Aurora’s poetry by means of her body. His insult articulates a larger double bind that is at the heart of Aurora Leigh: namely, the tension between the work’s lively interest in political questions and its commitment to representing these questions in an expressive, physical language.
Aurora Leigh’s political poetics, then, turns on the conflict between two kinds of bodies: the larger social body the poet seeks to represent and the distorting presence of her own embodied, feminine sensibility. In what follows, I argue that Aurora Leigh responds to this conflict by claiming disembodiment as a poetic and political strategy. While acknowledging the poem’s insistently physical idiom, I seek to uncover an alternative subtext of images of abstracted, vanishing, and intangible bodies, and to show how this subtext is equally central to Aurora Leigh. Through the associated figures of Aurora and Marian, Barrett Browning’s epic presents us with many examples of the body’s denial and disappearance. These negations offer a revitalized political poetics even as they disassociate women’s language from women’s physical experiences.
Recent work in nineteenth-century literature and science studies has challenged a longstanding "o... more Recent work in nineteenth-century literature and science studies has challenged a longstanding "one-culture" model by analyzing moments of rupture, tension, and discontinuity between the two fields. This essay extends this area of scholarship, arguing that poets such as Matthew Arnold, Alfred Tennyson, and Mathilde Blind experiment with epic time in order to challenge geology's displacement of the epic past. While the Victorian geologist and man of letters Charles Lyell incorporates epic poetry into his _Principles of Geology_ (1830-33) in order to show how deep time made the past of epic poetry seem foreshortened and obsolete, Tennyson's "In Memoriam" (1850) and Mathilde Blind's "The Ascent of Man" (1889) respond by claiming the epic as a domain that could resist scientific inquiry. In so doing, they show how epic form and epic temporality can be used to explore controversial questions of cosmological origins in ways that empirical science writing could not.
his article considers the political implications of Victorian language-study for Thomas Carlyle's... more his article considers the political implications of Victorian language-study for Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution (1837) (reprinted and edited by K.J. Fielding and David Sorensen (Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1989)). I investigate how Carlyle responded to the scientific study of language with what he termed a ‘bodied word’, a reading of language based in the word-become-flesh or the doctrine of the Incarnation. I show how this bodied word reflects wider changes in modern conceptions of the polity in the wake of the French Revolution, in the shift from a hereditary body politic towards what critics have termed a ‘social body’ or a more broadly inclusive model that incorporates the working classes. I then offer a reading of The French Revolution to show how Carlyle's French history was crucial to the linguistic and conceptual production of this liberal notion of the social body, even as he worked both to acknowledge and contain its political agency.
This essay argues that Ernest Jones and Feargus O’Connor’s Chartist periodical the Labourer utili... more This essay argues that Ernest Jones and Feargus O’Connor’s Chartist periodical the Labourer utilizes strategies of poetic repetition in order to reinvent the battle of Waterloo as a symbol of worldwide armed resistance to class oppression. The Labourer’s prose and verse contributions make repeated references to the violence of Waterloo, merging this poetic technique of repetition with the miscellaneous format of the periodical. In so doing, the Labourer counters representations in the mainstream press that depicted Waterloo as a triumph of the hereditary order, showing instead how standing armies might work in the service of an internationalist vision of united laborers.
Ecocene: Cappadocia journal of environmental humanities, Dec 28, 2022
This essay investigates ecological epiphany in short stories by Zadie Smith and Joyce Carol Oates... more This essay investigates ecological epiphany in short stories by Zadie Smith and Joyce Carol Oates, moments in which characters confront the link between their own consumption habits and planetary damage. These moments build on a longer literary history of epiphany in modern fiction, a history that foregrounds suddenness, physicality, and the mundane, but these short stories also adapt epiphany to address prominent concerns about anthropogenic climate change in the twenty-first century. Through close readings of Smith’s “The Dialectic” (2019), Smith’s “The Lazy River” (2017), and Oates’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (2019), I show how these stories’ ecological epiphanies invite the reader to emotionally confront the urgency of the climate crisis and to take action. While important arguments by Amitav Ghosh and Rob Nixon argue that literature must make planetary crisis visible, Smith’s and Oates’s short stories suggest that some contemporary writers now face a different issue, not a need to heighten the visibility of the damage, but rather a need to psychologically confront its terrible obviousness.
In her 1895 poem "Spring in the Alps," Mathilde Blind celebrates the joyful, unapologetic queerne... more In her 1895 poem "Spring in the Alps," Mathilde Blind celebrates the joyful, unapologetic queerness of dandelions:
The dandelion puffs her balls, Free spinsters of the air, Who scorn to wait for beetle calls Or bees to find them fair; But breaking through the painted walls Their sisters tamely bear, Fly off in dancing down, which falls And sprouts up everywhere.
(ll. 17–24)1 Through these anthropomorphized "spinsters," Blind merges two different accounts of reproduction from Charles Darwin's works. The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868) discusses spontaneous plant budding, while The Descent of Man (1871) describes how male animals vie for females' attention through display, dance, and song.2 Yet here, on this "lusty green" (l. 2), it is the spinster dandelion who "puffs her balls" in display, not to solicit a mate's attention, but for her own pleasure. The seeds "Fly off in dancing down" in language that hints at Darwin's male suitors, but heterosexual reproduction is not the aim of this performance. The poem uncovers the queer possibilities of nature, possibilities that celebrate nonreproductive desire while defying, even "scorn[ing]," the male / female binary found in the Descent.
Blind joins her late Victorian contemporaries Constance Naden and Laurence Hope in crafting a Darwinian poetics that draws on evolution and [End Page 97] sexual selection to uncover nature's queer possibilities. While the traffic of Darwin's ideas with misogynistic and homophobic rhetoric is well known, less attention has been paid to how his theories could also unsettle conventional accounts of gender, sexuality, and reproductive teleology.3 In this essay, I mean "queer" in Holly Furneaux's sense of "that which differs from the life-script of opposite-sex marriage and reproduction."4 All three poets lived lives that challenged this life script. Blind and Naden were both New Women who never married.5 Laurence Hope, less well known among literature and science scholars, was the pen name of Adela Florence Nicolson, wife of a colonel in the Bengal Army. She scandalized her contemporaries with her erotic verse and disregard of feminine modesty, and would dress herself—problematically—as a Pashtun boy in order to follow her husband out on his military campaigns.6
For these three poets, male pseudonyms were a means of crossing gender lines and facilitating publication. Blind wrote under "Claude Lake" for her first volume of poetry and Naden sometimes used "C. Arden" or "C.A." for her scientific writing.7 Nicolson kept the pseudonym Laurence Hope even after its status as a pseudonym was likely known.8 And all three poets worked with intertexts that explored ideas about gender and sexuality, especially a tradition of evolutionary verse that included works by Alfred Tennyson and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Hope's poetry also takes inspiration from bhakti verse, a tradition of Hindu devotional poetry that, as Rohit K. Dasgupta and Rima Bhattacharya have shown, challenges heterosexual norms.9 Together, their late-century scientific poems offer a testimony to the imaginative possibilities of Darwin's ideas, ideas that they used to decenter heterosexual marriage and to imagine a more gender-inclusive present.
This article argues that George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) aligns natural catastrophe w... more This article argues that George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) aligns natural catastrophe with the image of the disastrous female body in order to challenge contemporary geological readings of nature as a balanced, self-regulating domain. Both incorporating and revising the work of Charles Lyell, Oliver Goldsmith, and Georges Cuvier, Eliot emphasises the interconnectedness of human and planetary processes, feminises environmental catastrophe, and blends human and ecological history. She does so in order to write the human presence back into geological histories that tended to evacuate the human, and to invite readers to account for the effects their lifestyles and industries have upon the supposedly balanced and orderly processes of nature.
Aurora Leigh is a political poem because it is a physical poem. While feminist critics of the 197... more Aurora Leigh is a political poem because it is a physical poem. While feminist critics of the 1970s and 1980s celebrated the work’s vividly embodied imagery, a more recent critical interest in the so-called Spasmodic school of poetry, with its focus on sensations, rhythms, and pulses, has further emphasized the central role of women’s physical experience in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s epic.1 Such analyses magnify Aurora’s desire to craft a poetry that will express her own “full-veined, heaving, double-breasted Age.”2 And yet this same emphasis on the body also fuels the poem’s internal dismissal of women’s poetry. In Book II, the central male antagonist, Romney Leigh, points to Aurora’s body as an obstacle to political expression. Catching the young Aurora in the act of crowning herself as a poet, Romney insists that women cannot write about contemporary debates over labor or slavery because they understand everything in terms of their own experience: “All’s yours and you, / All, coloured with your blood, or otherwise / Just nothing to you” (II.196–198). In a powerfully essentializing gesture, Romney invalidates Aurora’s poetry by means of her body. His insult articulates a larger double bind that is at the heart of Aurora Leigh: namely, the tension between the work’s lively interest in political questions and its commitment to representing these questions in an expressive, physical language.
Aurora Leigh’s political poetics, then, turns on the conflict between two kinds of bodies: the larger social body the poet seeks to represent and the distorting presence of her own embodied, feminine sensibility. In what follows, I argue that Aurora Leigh responds to this conflict by claiming disembodiment as a poetic and political strategy. While acknowledging the poem’s insistently physical idiom, I seek to uncover an alternative subtext of images of abstracted, vanishing, and intangible bodies, and to show how this subtext is equally central to Aurora Leigh. Through the associated figures of Aurora and Marian, Barrett Browning’s epic presents us with many examples of the body’s denial and disappearance. These negations offer a revitalized political poetics even as they disassociate women’s language from women’s physical experiences.
Recent work in nineteenth-century literature and science studies has challenged a longstanding "o... more Recent work in nineteenth-century literature and science studies has challenged a longstanding "one-culture" model by analyzing moments of rupture, tension, and discontinuity between the two fields. This essay extends this area of scholarship, arguing that poets such as Matthew Arnold, Alfred Tennyson, and Mathilde Blind experiment with epic time in order to challenge geology's displacement of the epic past. While the Victorian geologist and man of letters Charles Lyell incorporates epic poetry into his _Principles of Geology_ (1830-33) in order to show how deep time made the past of epic poetry seem foreshortened and obsolete, Tennyson's "In Memoriam" (1850) and Mathilde Blind's "The Ascent of Man" (1889) respond by claiming the epic as a domain that could resist scientific inquiry. In so doing, they show how epic form and epic temporality can be used to explore controversial questions of cosmological origins in ways that empirical science writing could not.
his article considers the political implications of Victorian language-study for Thomas Carlyle's... more his article considers the political implications of Victorian language-study for Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution (1837) (reprinted and edited by K.J. Fielding and David Sorensen (Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1989)). I investigate how Carlyle responded to the scientific study of language with what he termed a ‘bodied word’, a reading of language based in the word-become-flesh or the doctrine of the Incarnation. I show how this bodied word reflects wider changes in modern conceptions of the polity in the wake of the French Revolution, in the shift from a hereditary body politic towards what critics have termed a ‘social body’ or a more broadly inclusive model that incorporates the working classes. I then offer a reading of The French Revolution to show how Carlyle's French history was crucial to the linguistic and conceptual production of this liberal notion of the social body, even as he worked both to acknowledge and contain its political agency.
This essay argues that Ernest Jones and Feargus O’Connor’s Chartist periodical the Labourer utili... more This essay argues that Ernest Jones and Feargus O’Connor’s Chartist periodical the Labourer utilizes strategies of poetic repetition in order to reinvent the battle of Waterloo as a symbol of worldwide armed resistance to class oppression. The Labourer’s prose and verse contributions make repeated references to the violence of Waterloo, merging this poetic technique of repetition with the miscellaneous format of the periodical. In so doing, the Labourer counters representations in the mainstream press that depicted Waterloo as a triumph of the hereditary order, showing instead how standing armies might work in the service of an internationalist vision of united laborers.
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The dandelion puffs her balls,
Free spinsters of the air,
Who scorn to wait for beetle calls
Or bees to find them fair;
But breaking through the painted walls
Their sisters tamely bear,
Fly off in dancing down, which falls
And sprouts up everywhere.
(ll. 17–24)1
Through these anthropomorphized "spinsters," Blind merges two different accounts of reproduction from Charles Darwin's works. The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868) discusses spontaneous plant budding, while The Descent of Man (1871) describes how male animals vie for females' attention through display, dance, and song.2 Yet here, on this "lusty green" (l. 2), it is the spinster dandelion who "puffs her balls" in display, not to solicit a mate's attention, but for her own pleasure. The seeds "Fly off in dancing down" in language that hints at Darwin's male suitors, but heterosexual reproduction is not the aim of this performance. The poem uncovers the queer possibilities of nature, possibilities that celebrate nonreproductive desire while defying, even "scorn[ing]," the male / female binary found in the Descent.
Blind joins her late Victorian contemporaries Constance Naden and Laurence Hope in crafting a Darwinian poetics that draws on evolution and [End Page 97] sexual selection to uncover nature's queer possibilities. While the traffic of Darwin's ideas with misogynistic and homophobic rhetoric is well known, less attention has been paid to how his theories could also unsettle conventional accounts of gender, sexuality, and reproductive teleology.3 In this essay, I mean "queer" in Holly Furneaux's sense of "that which differs from the life-script of opposite-sex marriage and reproduction."4 All three poets lived lives that challenged this life script. Blind and Naden were both New Women who never married.5 Laurence Hope, less well known among literature and science scholars, was the pen name of Adela Florence Nicolson, wife of a colonel in the Bengal Army. She scandalized her contemporaries with her erotic verse and disregard of feminine modesty, and would dress herself—problematically—as a Pashtun boy in order to follow her husband out on his military campaigns.6
For these three poets, male pseudonyms were a means of crossing gender lines and facilitating publication. Blind wrote under "Claude Lake" for her first volume of poetry and Naden sometimes used "C. Arden" or "C.A." for her scientific writing.7 Nicolson kept the pseudonym Laurence Hope even after its status as a pseudonym was likely known.8 And all three poets worked with intertexts that explored ideas about gender and sexuality, especially a tradition of evolutionary verse that included works by Alfred Tennyson and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Hope's poetry also takes inspiration from bhakti verse, a tradition of Hindu devotional poetry that, as Rohit K. Dasgupta and Rima Bhattacharya have shown, challenges heterosexual norms.9 Together, their late-century scientific poems offer a testimony to the imaginative possibilities of Darwin's ideas, ideas that they used to decenter heterosexual marriage and to imagine a more gender-inclusive present.
Aurora Leigh’s political poetics, then, turns on the conflict between two kinds of bodies: the larger social body the poet seeks to represent and the distorting presence of her own embodied, feminine sensibility. In what follows, I argue that Aurora Leigh responds to this conflict by claiming disembodiment as a poetic and political strategy. While acknowledging the poem’s insistently physical idiom, I seek to uncover an alternative subtext of images of abstracted, vanishing, and intangible bodies, and to show how this subtext is equally central to Aurora Leigh. Through the associated figures of Aurora and Marian, Barrett Browning’s epic presents us with many examples of the body’s denial and disappearance. These negations offer a revitalized political poetics even as they disassociate women’s language from women’s physical experiences.
poetry into his _Principles of Geology_ (1830-33) in order to show how deep time made the past of epic poetry seem foreshortened and obsolete, Tennyson's "In Memoriam" (1850) and Mathilde Blind's "The Ascent of Man" (1889) respond by claiming the epic as a domain that could resist scientific inquiry. In so doing, they show how epic form and epic temporality can be used to explore controversial questions of cosmological origins in ways that empirical science writing could not.
The dandelion puffs her balls,
Free spinsters of the air,
Who scorn to wait for beetle calls
Or bees to find them fair;
But breaking through the painted walls
Their sisters tamely bear,
Fly off in dancing down, which falls
And sprouts up everywhere.
(ll. 17–24)1
Through these anthropomorphized "spinsters," Blind merges two different accounts of reproduction from Charles Darwin's works. The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868) discusses spontaneous plant budding, while The Descent of Man (1871) describes how male animals vie for females' attention through display, dance, and song.2 Yet here, on this "lusty green" (l. 2), it is the spinster dandelion who "puffs her balls" in display, not to solicit a mate's attention, but for her own pleasure. The seeds "Fly off in dancing down" in language that hints at Darwin's male suitors, but heterosexual reproduction is not the aim of this performance. The poem uncovers the queer possibilities of nature, possibilities that celebrate nonreproductive desire while defying, even "scorn[ing]," the male / female binary found in the Descent.
Blind joins her late Victorian contemporaries Constance Naden and Laurence Hope in crafting a Darwinian poetics that draws on evolution and [End Page 97] sexual selection to uncover nature's queer possibilities. While the traffic of Darwin's ideas with misogynistic and homophobic rhetoric is well known, less attention has been paid to how his theories could also unsettle conventional accounts of gender, sexuality, and reproductive teleology.3 In this essay, I mean "queer" in Holly Furneaux's sense of "that which differs from the life-script of opposite-sex marriage and reproduction."4 All three poets lived lives that challenged this life script. Blind and Naden were both New Women who never married.5 Laurence Hope, less well known among literature and science scholars, was the pen name of Adela Florence Nicolson, wife of a colonel in the Bengal Army. She scandalized her contemporaries with her erotic verse and disregard of feminine modesty, and would dress herself—problematically—as a Pashtun boy in order to follow her husband out on his military campaigns.6
For these three poets, male pseudonyms were a means of crossing gender lines and facilitating publication. Blind wrote under "Claude Lake" for her first volume of poetry and Naden sometimes used "C. Arden" or "C.A." for her scientific writing.7 Nicolson kept the pseudonym Laurence Hope even after its status as a pseudonym was likely known.8 And all three poets worked with intertexts that explored ideas about gender and sexuality, especially a tradition of evolutionary verse that included works by Alfred Tennyson and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Hope's poetry also takes inspiration from bhakti verse, a tradition of Hindu devotional poetry that, as Rohit K. Dasgupta and Rima Bhattacharya have shown, challenges heterosexual norms.9 Together, their late-century scientific poems offer a testimony to the imaginative possibilities of Darwin's ideas, ideas that they used to decenter heterosexual marriage and to imagine a more gender-inclusive present.
Aurora Leigh’s political poetics, then, turns on the conflict between two kinds of bodies: the larger social body the poet seeks to represent and the distorting presence of her own embodied, feminine sensibility. In what follows, I argue that Aurora Leigh responds to this conflict by claiming disembodiment as a poetic and political strategy. While acknowledging the poem’s insistently physical idiom, I seek to uncover an alternative subtext of images of abstracted, vanishing, and intangible bodies, and to show how this subtext is equally central to Aurora Leigh. Through the associated figures of Aurora and Marian, Barrett Browning’s epic presents us with many examples of the body’s denial and disappearance. These negations offer a revitalized political poetics even as they disassociate women’s language from women’s physical experiences.
poetry into his _Principles of Geology_ (1830-33) in order to show how deep time made the past of epic poetry seem foreshortened and obsolete, Tennyson's "In Memoriam" (1850) and Mathilde Blind's "The Ascent of Man" (1889) respond by claiming the epic as a domain that could resist scientific inquiry. In so doing, they show how epic form and epic temporality can be used to explore controversial questions of cosmological origins in ways that empirical science writing could not.