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Hemispheres and Stratospheres offers eight essays that address the art, literature, science, and politics of distance during the long eighteenth century. This volume celebrates the intercontinental expansiveness of Enlightenment distance culture—a culture that continues to encourage modern pursuits such as space travel, tourism, telecommunication, multiculturalism, and international research collaboration.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Part I: Best Seen at a Distance: The Art of the Far Away
Looking Down: Observations on Elevation, Prospect Vision, and Eighteenth-Century Imagination
Roger D. Lund
Space and the Meaning of Distance in Bernardo Vittone’s Architecture
William Stargard
Change of Air, Change of Self: Long Distance and Human Adaptability in Imaginary Voyages of the Long Eighteenth Century
Bärbel Czennia
Part II: Culture Over and As Distance
Distant Lands, Distant Races, Distant Cultures: Two Eighteenth-Century South Indian Priests Go to Europe
Brijraj Singh
Connecting Hemispheres, Playing with Distance: Rammohun Roy, an Indian Transnationalist
Chandrava Chakravarty
Part III: The Nature of Distance
New Science, Distant Reading, and Distance as Intersubjectivity
Rachel Mann
Orbiting Iambs: Enlightenment Cosmology and Conveniently Condensed Immensities
Kevin L. Cope
Journeys to the Edge: The Idea and Experience of Distance in Archival Research
Phyllis Thompson
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
About the author
KEVIN L. COPE is Adams Professor of English Literature and a member of the comparative literature faculty at Louisiana State University. Among his many books and edited collections are
Criteria of Certainty,
John Locke Revisited, and
In and After the Beginning. He is also editor of the annual journal 1650–1850:
Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era.
