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Books > History > World history > 1750 to 1900
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The Starry Sky Within - Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature (Hardcover)
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The Starry Sky Within - Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature (Hardcover)
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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.
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