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The Starry Sky Within is an innovative study of previously unexplored connections between nineteenth-century astronomy and British literature. Nineteenth-century astronomers revealed a staggeringly mobile world extending far beyond the scope of human vision and Henchman examines how this discovery inspired the novelists of the day.
List of contents
- Introduction
- Part One: Observers in Motion
- 1: Astronomy, Optics, and Point of View
- 2: Thomas De Quincey's Disoriented Universe
- 3: Grief in Motion: Parallax and Orbing in Tennyson
- Part Two: Astronomy and the Multiplot Novel
- Introduction: Novels as Celestial Systems
- 4: Hardy's Stargazers and the Astronomy of Other Minds
- 5: George Eliot and the Sweep of the Senses
- 6: Narratives on a Grand Scale: Astronomy and Narrative Space
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
About the author
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 Creatures 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.
Summary
The Starry Sky Within is an innovative study of previously unexplored connections between nineteenth-century astronomy and British literature. Nineteenth-century astronomers revealed a staggeringly mobile world extending far beyond the scope of human vision and Henchman examines how this discovery inspired the novelists of the day.
Additional text
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.
