Iinvestigates some of the ways in which Laplacian and, indeed, Newtonian models of observation and the universe are at once assimilated and complicated by Romantic and Victorian writers such as Carlyle, Burke, Abbott, Poe and Wordsworth. This book explains how some of these literary reimaginings look forward to more modern conceptions of science.

Spend the holidays with the Master of the Macabre

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.

At a time when biblical authority was under challenge from the Higher Criticism and evolutionary science, ‘what providence meant’ was the most keenly contested of questions. This book takes up the controversial subject of Dickens and religion, and offers a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary area of religion and literature. In a close study of major novels, it argues that networks of biblical allusion reveal the Judeo-Christian grand narrative as key to his development as a writer, and as the ontological ground on which he stands to appeal to ‘the conscience of a Christian people’. Engaging the biblical narrative in dialogue with other contemporary narratives that concern themselves with origins, destinations, and hermeneutic decipherments, the inimitable Dickens affirms the Bible’s still-active role in popular culture. The providential thinking of two twentieth-century theorists, Bakhtin and Ricoeur, sheds light on an exploration of Dickens’s narrative theology.

This book explores the aesthetic practices used by Dickens to make the space which we have come to know as the Dickensian City. It concentrates on three very precise techniques for the production of social space (counter-mapping, overlaying and troping). The chapters show the scapes and writings which influenced him and the way he transformed them, packaged them and passed them on for future use. The city is shown to be an imagined or virtual world but with a serious aim for a serious game: Dickens sets up a workshop for the simulation of real societies and cities. This urban building with is transferable to other literatures and medial forms. The book offers vital understanding of how writing and image work in particular ways to recreate and re-enchant society and the built environment. It will be of interest to scholars of literature, media, film, urban studies, politics and economics.

Space is a central topic in cultural and narrative theory today, although in most cases theory assumes Newtonian absolute space. However, the idea of a universal homogeneous space is now obsolete. Black holes, multiple dimensions, quantum entanglement, and spatio-temporal distortions of relativity have passed into culture at large. This book examines whether narrative can be used to represent these "impossible" spaces. Impossible topologies abound in ancient mythologies, from the Australian Aborigines’ "dream-time" to the multiple-layer universe of the Sumerians. More recently, from Alice’s adventures in Wonderland to contemporary science fiction’s obsession with black holes and quantum paradoxes, counter-intuitive spaces are a prominent feature of modern and postmodern narrative. With the rise and popularization of science fiction, the inventiveness and variety of impossible narrative spaces explodes. The author analyses the narrative techniques used to represent such spaces alongside their cultural significance. Each chapter connects narrative deformation of space with historical problematic of time, and demonstrates the cognitive and perceptual primacy of narrative in representing, imagining and apprehending new forms of space and time. This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the connection between narratology, cultural theory, science fiction, and studies of place.

Oscar Wilde famously spoke of 'the critic as artist' whilst Terry Eagleton once celebrated 'the critic as clown'. This exciting new volume brings together a range of writings that seek to radically re-imagine the often pale figure of the literary critic. In doing so we here glimpse a host of unfamiliar figures from the critic as pedestrian to the critic as suicide through the critic as revivalist and even the critic as bodger. The result is a book that seeks to locate the truly critical critic -- or, to be paradoxical, the critic as critic; the critic who is a critic of criticism as conventionally understood. This is the final volume of the immensely successful 'Critical Inventions' series.