登入選單
返回Google圖書搜尋
The Starry Sky Within
Anna Henchman
其他書名
Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature
出版OUP Oxford, 2014-02
主題History / Modern / GeneralLiterary Criticism / GeneralLiterary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, WelshLiterary Criticism / Modern / 19th CenturyScience / Space Science / AstronomyScience / History
ISBN01996869639780199686964
URLhttp://books.google.com.hk/books?id=6iZwAgAAQBAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api
EBookSAMPLE
註釋Tracing unexplored connections between nineteenth-century astronomy and literature, The Starry Sky Within offers a new understanding of literary point of view as essentially multiple, mobile, and comparative. Nineteenth-century astronomy revealed a cosmos of celestial systems in constant motion. Stars, comets, planets, and moons coursed through space in complex and changing relation. As the skies were in motion, so too was the human subject. Astronomers showed that human beings never perceive the world from a stable position. The mobility of our bodies in space and the very structure of stereoscopic vision mean that point of view is neither singular nor stable. We always see the world as amalgam of fractured perspectives. In this innovative study, Henchman shows that the reconceptualization of the skies gave poets and novelists new spaces in which to indulge their longing to escape the limitations of individual perspective. She links astronomy and optics to the form of the multiplot novel, with its many centers of consciousness, complex systems of relation, and crisscrossing points of view. Accounts of a world and a subject both in relative motion shaped the form of grand-scale narratives such as Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Bleak House, and Daniel Deronda. De Quincey, Tennyson, and Eliot befriended leading astronomers and visited observatories, while Hardy learned about astronomy from the vast popular literature of the day. These writers use cosmic distances to dislodge their readers from the earth, setting human perception against views from high above and then telescoping back to earth again. What results is a new perception of the mobility of point of view in both literature and science.