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"In Modernism and Cosmology, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett are examined as test cases for modernist aesthetic responses to a new cosmology. Katherine Ebury teases out the reception of Einstein's cosmology in modernist literary culture, both locally and globally. Detailed close readings of the key works of Yeats, Joyce and Beckett are used to develop alternative reading models of texts such as Finnegans Wake and 'The Trilogy'; within these texts we find multiple references to binary stars, nebulae, the Big Bang Theory, the space-time continuum and the Expanding Universe and many other key concepts of the 'mysterious universe' of the new physics, providing insights into their difficulty, absurdity and beauty. Careful attention to contemporary popularisations allows us to achieve a measure of the intellectual toolbox with which these modernist writers equipped themselves and to understand their creative transformations of this material"--
List of contents
1. Introduction: Cosmic Modernism 2. Yeatsian Cosmology 3. Joycean Cosmologies 4. Beyond the Rainbow: Spectroscopy in the Wake 5. The Beckettian Cosmos 6. Stars and Atoms in 'The Trilogy' Epilogue - International Modernism Bibliography Index
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“Ebury’s book offers excellent observations on the origins and functions of a vast number of astronomical references she traces in Yeats, Joyce and Beckett, and the author constructively brings together and builds on the large number of recent studies on the scientific reading of her subjects. … Cosmology and Modernism offers an enticing roadmap for novelistic astropoetics that will surely generate further explorations of the field.” (Florian Kläger, Symbolism, October, 2016)
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"Ebury's book offers excellent observations on the origins and functions of a vast number of astronomical references she traces in Yeats, Joyce and Beckett, and the author constructively brings together and builds on the large number of recent studies on the scientific reading of her subjects. ... Cosmology and Modernism offers an enticing roadmap for novelistic astropoetics that will surely generate further explorations of the field." (Florian Kläger, Symbolism, October, 2016)
