Cantitate/Preț
Produs
Total produse
Vezi coșul
The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature de Anna Henchman

The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature

Autor Anna Henchman
en Limba Engleză Paperback – 30 noi 2017

Considerăm că The Starry Sky Within reprezintă o contribuție remarcabilă la studiile interdisciplinare, reușind să unească istoria astronomiei, optica și critica literară într-o analiză riguroasă a culturii victoriene. Premisa centrală a lucrării explorează modul în care revelațiile astronomice despre un cosmos în continuă mișcare au recalibrat percepția umană, oferind poeților și romancierilor un nou limbaj pentru a descrie punctul de vedere. Apreciem modul în care Anna Henchman demonstrează că instabilitatea subiectului în spațiu și structura vederii stereoscopice au influențat direct forma narativă a romanelor de mari dimensiuni, precum Bleak House sau Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

În ceea ce privește structura, volumul este organizat pentru a evidenția cum distanțele cosmice și telescoparea perspectivei — de la scara galactică la cea terestră — au permis scriitorilor să depășească limitările perspectivei individuale. Tonul este unul academic precis, ancorat în date istorice despre prieteniile dintre scriitori ca George Eliot și astronomii epocii. Această lucrare acoperă o arie similară cu Thomas Hardy's Novel Universe de Pamela Gossin, dar propune o abordare mai interdisciplinară, extinzând analiza de la un singur autor la un fenomen cultural și narativ vast care cuprinde întreaga epocă victoriană. De asemenea, spre deosebire de Discourses of Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain, care se concentrează pe tehnologiile vizuale generale, Anna Henchman izolează specific influența mecanicii cerești asupra tehnicii narative, oferind o perspectivă tehnică asupra mobilității punctului de vedere.

Citește tot Restrânge

Preț: 27878 lei

Preț vechi: 36056 lei
-23%

Puncte Express: 418
Paperback 27878 lei
Hardback 78397 lei

Carte tipărită la comandă

Livrare economică 18-24 iunie

 Adaugă în coș

Wish list
Gift list
Am citit!
Adaugă în listă

Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780198797593
ISBN-10: 0198797591
Pagini: 314
Ilustrații: 32 black-and-white halftones
Dimensiuni: 158 x 235 x 16 mm
Greutate: 0.54 kg
Editura: OUP OXFORD
Colecția OUP Oxford
Locul publicării:Oxford, United Kingdom

De ce să citești această carte

Recomandăm această carte cercetătorilor și studenților interesați de relația dintre știință și literatură. Cititorul va obține o înțelegere profundă a modului în care descoperirile astronomice au modelat tehnicile narative moderne. Este o lectură esențială pentru a înțelege de ce marii romancieri victorieni au adoptat perspective multiple și mobile, transformând cerul înstelat dintr-un decor pasiv într-un motor al inovației literare.

Despre autor

Anna Henchman este o cercetătoare specializată în literatură victoriană și istoria științei. Prin studiile sale, ea explorează modul în care conceptele științifice de spațiu, timp și viziune sunt reconfigurate în textul literar. În The Starry Sky Within, Henchman valorifică interesul său pentru cultura vizuală și istoria ideilor, demonstrând o capacitate remarcabilă de a naviga între precizia datelor astronomice și subtilitatea analizei stilistice. Lucrarea sa reflectă o cunoaștere detaliată a contextului istoric al OUP Oxford, fiind recunoscută pentru rigoarea cu care tratează intersecția dintre disciplinele umaniste și cele reale.

Descriere

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 an 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 criss-crossing 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.

Recenzii

From start to finish, The Starry Sky Within makes its case imaginatively but judiciously, connecting the astronomical and the literary in sophisticated, multifaceted, and thoroughly convincing ways. Henchman remains careful throughout to avoid collapsing literature and astronomy into one another, while remaining alive to the exciting possibilities that arise when they are put into conversation. This deeply knowledgeable and consistently illuminating book will be a valuable resource for scholars of literature and the history of science, and for anyone interested in Victorian intellectual history.
A highly original academic study, which offers a genuinely fresh way of thinking about some classic Victorian literature. Anna Henchman argues that, far more than was previously supposed, the Victorian imagination was fascinated by contemporary astronomy, and morally transformed by the stellar visions of a mysterious, ever-expanding and possibly godless universe. She carefully introduces a series of astronomical concepts such as parallax, optical distortion, and gravitational attraction, then skilfully applies these as critical metaphors to a well-chosen collection of Victorian authors, thereby bringing them into surprising new focus. In the process, she wonderfully succeeds in creating what is virtually a new critical discourse.
Tennyson and Hardy may have gazed at the heavens with a rare intensity, but astronomy provided an important imaginative resource for many poets, novelists and other writers during the nineteenth century, as Anna Henchman amply illustrates in this rich and engaging study.
Out of this world! Written with elegance and erudition, Henchman's The Starry Sky Within extends the reach of literature to the cosmos, where it reflects new truths and fresh insights.
This impressively wide-ranging study focusses our attention on the extremes and contrasts that Romantic and Victorian people realised as they contemplated human and astronomical life. Henchman makes compelling connections between narrative and astronomical spaces across a range of writers.
Henchman has succeeded admirably in revealing what several prominent authors really intended ... a fascinating re-examination of Victorian literature.
Grasping the genius of Anna Henchmanâs deeply learned, elegantly conceived, and often beautifully written book requires unraveling the meaning of its enigmatic title ... The starry sky within is a wonder; so, too, and for the same reasons, The Starry Sky Within.
a welcome and valuable addition to the study of Victorian science and culture ... full of fine readings of texts.
The Starry Sky Within answers [the] appeal for a more robust interdisciplinary scholarship that enters into close and lively dialogue with the history of astronomy.
stimulating and provocative ... packed full of information and analysis ... [Henchman] very deftly juggles a large amount of knowledge from the fields of nineteenth-century literature, astronomy, cosmology, philosophy, and optics together with modern philosophy and literature theory.
Astronomy, as The Starry Sky Within manifestly demonstrates, is integral to fully appreciating the vital issues of narrative and poetic point of view in Victorian literature.

Notă biografică

Anna Henchman is Assistant Professor of English at Boston University. She was educated at Yale and Harvard, and before joining BU's English department, was a Junior Fellow at Harvard's Society of Fellows. She focuses on nineteenth-century British literature, science, and the mind. Her next book project, tentatively titled 'The Inner Lives of Tiny Creature in Literature and Science', explores how nineteenth-century poets, novelists, and naturalists imagined what it would be like to be inside the mind of beings whose perceptual faculties differ dramatically from those of human beings, such as worms, snails, animalcules, and imaginary creatures. Her work consistently explores how literature challenges the constraints of everyday human perception.