“Tracking the strange pleasures and anxieties around geologic thinking in literary texts, popular culture, and scientific disciplines, Dana Luciano beautifully renders how time is felt and experienced at different scales and intensities. Her account of how biopolitics underwrote the pleasingly terrifying view of deep time as expressed by the fossil record is a signature accomplishment. <i>How the Earth Feels</i> makes a stunningly original contribution. I savored every sentence in this book.” - Stephanie Foote, author of (The Parvenu's Plot: Gender, Culture, and Class in the Age of Realism) “This wide-ranging book takes geology as nothing less than the foundation of modernity, a form of world-making extending from the nineteenth century to our own time, featuring the giddy fantasies of racism and colonialism as much as the rigors of a new science. Empiricism and materialism double here as biopolitics. Clear-eyed, lucid, timely.” - Wai Chee Dimock, author of (Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival) "In this compellingly argued and beautifully written monograph, Luciano (Rutgers Univ.) discusses 19th-century scientific and literary writings about the emerging field of geology as a rigorous field of inquiry. . . . Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals." - D. J. Rosenthal (Choice) "[<i>How the Earth Feels</i>] is not only an original contribution to the environmental humanities and American cultural history, offering a detailed exploration of the relationship between science and society in the nineteenth century, but it also provides essential insights for scholars engaged with the Anthropocene today." - Amanda Halter (Amerikastudien)