Romantic Priority Claims, or, Who Has Priority in Deep Time?

This essay seeks to extend the definition of the term priority claim, arguing that some kinds of priority claims operate across literature and science and may be made on behalf of past actors as well as oneself. My examples are drawn primarily from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts of the place of early or ancestral humans in deep time, particularly those of Thomas Carlyle, John Lubbock, and Johann Gottfried Herder. In making this argument, I attend specifically to the role of race and gender in these accounts and to the rhetorical and affective intensity accruing around the identities of those imagined to inhabit deep time. Deep time, as a contentious and vaguely defined sphere of discovery prior to the establishment of radiometric dating, provides a field especially adapted to priority claims in this extended sense.