'Focusing on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century travellers in Scotland, Tom Furniss finds new and striking things to say about the literary inflections of pre-scientific geological writing. Combining extensive research with personal experience of the Highlands, for anyone wishing to explore Scottish intersections of geology, literature and aesthetics this is the go-to book.'Nicholas Roe, University of St AndrewsDiscovering the Footsteps of Time traces the history of geological travel writing about Scotland across the historical periods of the Scottish Enlightenment and British Romanticism. It probes the development of a distinctively Scottish tradition of geological travel writing from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. The tradition tracks a fertile interaction of scientific and aesthetic themes, mediated through literary techniques, which highlights the emergence of 'Romanticism' as a distinctive, recognisable cultural movement of taste and style. Making an important new contribution to our understanding of the 'discovery' and representation of Scotland in the long eighteenth century, the book explores why Scotland's topography has been decisive in the history of geology. Written by a literary academic rather than a geologist, the book is as much concerned with textual strategies and the aesthetic experience of geological discovery as with geology itself.Tom Furniss was Senior Lecture in English at the University of Strathclyde from 1987 to 2017. He is the author of Edmund Burke's Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution (1993) and numerous articles and chapters on poetry, politics, philosophy, aesthetics and science in the Enlightenment and Romantic period. He is also co-author, with Michael Bath, of Reading Poetry (2007).Cover image: John MacCulloch, 'View of the Scuir of Egg' (detail), in Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (1819), III, plate v; by permission of University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections.Cover design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk[EUP logo]edinburghuniversitypress.comISBN 978-1-4744-1001-4Barcode
