Wednesday Talk: February 12, 2025, at 2-4pm. It is in-person and on Zoom

ABSTRACT: Ecocritical scholarship on 19th-century literature has explored the impact on Victorian writers of the new geological and palaeontological science and the dizzying apprehensions of deep time that came with it. Writing a generation or two earlier, Jane Austen might seem a less promising candidate for this kind of analysis. Her contemporaries, however, were already growing alarmed by what a pioneering geologist of 1805 called “the abyss of time,” while the fossil-hunting excavations of Mary Anning and others on the Dorset coast, notably Anning’s sensational ichthyosaur discovery of 1811–12, were attracting widespread attention. What happens when we read Austen’s Persuasion (1817) in this unfolding context, with its interest in human phenomena—cold-bloodedness and predation; the unstable stratification of rank or class; social and dynastic survival or extinction—for which geology and palaeontology were offering new metaphors?

BIO: Tom Keymer is Chancellor Henry N.R. Jackman University Professor of English at the University of Toronto. His books include Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel 1660-1820 (2019), Jane Austen: A Very Short Introduction (2022), and the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Northanger Abbey (2024). He is co-General Editor of the in-progress Cambridge History of the Literature of London.