At this moment the concept of the Anthropocene is challenging us to rethink our relationship
to the earth and its history but we have not yet fully understood the extent to which our
knowledge of earth history has shaped the historical culture of modernity. This study examines
the relationship of geology - including its central narratives metaphors topoi and other
imaginative tools - to the broader historical imagination that has until now been called
historicism. Two major figures in the rise of historical conservationism and aesthetic
historicism in nineteenth-century Europe guide this study of geohistoricism: the Austrian
writer painter and art conservator Adalbert Stifter whose novel Der Nachsommer (Indian
Summer 1857) narrates the rise of geohistoricism through the friendship of a geologist and his
art-historian mentor and French architect and conservator Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc
whose theoretical abstract imaginative understanding of restoration based on the geology of
Georges Cuvier informed his practical approach. These authors reveal how geological thought
provides a powerful new way to envision and reconstruct past worlds even as it also
demonstrates the erosive precariousness of our present.
