Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic GeologyWhy are rocks and landforms so prominent in British Romantic poetry? Why, for example, does Shelley choose a mountain as the locus of a "voice to repeal large codes of fraud and woe"? Why does a cliff, in the boat stealing episode of Wordsworth's Prelude, chastise the young thief? Why is petrifaction, or "stonifying," in Blake's coinage, the ultimate figure of dehumanization? Noah Heringman maintains that British literary culture was fundamentally