Overview

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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9780198797593

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Reviews

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. Allen MacDuffie, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 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. Richard Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder 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. Peter Garratt, British Society for Literature and Science 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. Karen Chase, University of Virginia 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. Dame Gillian Beer, Cambridge University Henchman has succeeded admirably in revealing what several prominent authors really intended ... a fascinating re-examination of Victorian literature. Clifford Cunningham, The Sun News Miami Grasping the genius of Anna Henchmanas 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. Cannon Schmitt, University of Toronto a welcome and valuable addition to the study of Victorian science and culture ... full of fine readings of texts. George Levine, Rutgers University 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. Andrew Radford, University of Glasgow 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. The Renaissance Mathematicus 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. Gowan Dawson, Modern Language Review

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. Allen MacDuffie, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 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. Richard Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder 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. Peter Garratt, British Society for Literature and Science 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. Karen Chase, University of Virginia 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. Dame Gillian Beer, Cambridge University Henchman has succeeded admirably in revealing what several prominent authors really intended ... a fascinating re-examination of Victorian literature. Clifford Cunningham, The Sun News Miami Grasping the genius of Anna Henchmanas 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. Cannon Schmitt, University of Toronto a welcome and valuable addition to the study of Victorian science and culture ... full of fine readings of texts. George Levine, Rutgers University 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. Andrew Radford, University of Glasgow 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. The Renaissance Mathematicus

Author Information

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.

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