-PDF Download- The Romantic Imagination And Astronomy EBOOK

The Romantic Imagination and Astronomy

Author: Dometa Wiegand Brothers

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-04-15

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 1137474343

In the nineteenth century the beauty of the night sky is the source of both imaginative wonder in poetry and political and commercial power through navigation. The Romantic Imagination and Astronomy examines the impact of astronomical discovery and imperial exploration on poets including Barbauld, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Rossetti.

Imagination and Science in Romanticism

Author: Richard C. Sha

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Published: 2021-03-02

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 1421439832

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Sha concludes that both fields benefited from thinking about how imagination could cooperate with reason—but that this partnership was impossible unless imagination's penchant for fantasy could be contained.

Wordsworth, Coleridge, and 'the language of the heavens'

Author: Thomas Owens

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-05-30

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 0192577565

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Thomas Owens explores some of the exultant visions inspired by Wordsworth's and Coleridge's close scrutiny of the night sky, the natural world, and the domains of science. He examines a set of scientific patterns drawn from natural, geometric, celestial, and astronomical sources which Wordsworth and Coleridge used to express their ideas about poetry, religion, literary criticism, and philosophy, and establishes the central importance of analogy in their creative thinking. Analogies prompted the poets' imaginings in geometry and cartography, in nature (representations of the moon) and natural history (studies of spider-webs, streams, and dew), in calculus and conical refraction, and in the discovery of infra-red and ultraviolet light. Although this is primarily a study of the patterns which inspired their writing, the findings overturn the prevalent critical consensus that Wordsworth and Coleridge did not have the access, interest, or capacity to understand the latest developments in nineteenth-century astronomy and mathematics, which they did in fact possess. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and 'the language of the heavens' reinstates many relationships which the poets had with scientists and their sources. Most significantly, the book illustrates that these sources are not simply another context or historical lens through which to engage with Wordsworth's and Coleridge's work but are instead a controlling device of the symbolic imagination. Exploring the structures behind Wordsworth's and Coleridge's poems and metaphysics stakes out a return to the evidence of the Romantic imagination, not for its own sake, but in order to reveal that their analogical configuration of the world provided them with a scaffold for thinking, an intellectual orrery which ordered artistic consciousness and which they never abandoned.

Handbook of British Romanticism

Author: Ralf Haekel

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2017-09-11

Total Pages: 725

ISBN-13: 3110376695

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The Handbook of British Romanticism is a state of the art investigation of Romantic literature and theory, a field that probably changed more quickly and more fundamentally than any other traditional era in literary studies. Since the early 1980s, Romantic studies has widened its scope significantly: The canon has been expanded, hitherto ignored genres have been investigated and new topics of research explored. After these profound changes, intensified by the general crisis of literary theory since the turn of the millennium, traditional concepts such as subjectivity, imagination and the creative genius have lost their status as paradigms defining Romanticism. The handbook will feature discussions of key concepts such as history, class, gender, science and the use of media as well as a thorough account of the most central literary genres around the turn of the 19th century. The focus of the book, however, will lie on a discussion of key literary texts in the light of the most recent theoretical developments. Thus, the Handbook of British Romanticism will provide students with an introduction to Romantic literature in general and literary scholars with a discussion of innovative and groundbreaking theoretical developments.

Black Prometheus

Author: Jared Hickman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 545

ISBN-13: 0190272589

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The Prometheus myth, for several reasons became a crucial site for conceptualizing human liberation in the immanent space of a finite globe structured by white domination and black slavery. The titan's defiant theft of fire from the regnant gods was translated through a high-stakes racial coding either as an 'African' revolt against the cosmic status quo that augured a pure autonomy, a black revolutionary immanence against which idealist philosophers like Hegel defined their projects and slaveholders defended their lives and positions. Or as a 'Caucasian' reflection of the divine power evidently working in favor of Euro-Christian civilization that transmuted the naked egoism of conquest into a righteous heteronomy-Euro-Christian civilization's mobilization by the Absolute or its internalization of a transcendent principle of universal Reason.

Book-Men, Book Clubs, and the Romantic Literary Sphere

Author: Ina Ferris

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-08-29

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1137367601

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This book re-reads the tangled relations of book culture and literary culture in the early nineteenth century by restoring to view the figure of the bookman and the effaced history of his book clubs. As outliers inserting themselves into the matrix of literary production rather than remaining within that of reception, both provoked debate by producing, writing, and circulating books in ways that expanded fundamental points of literary orientation in lateral directions not coincident with those of the literary sphere. Deploying a wide range of historical, archival and literary materials, the study combines the history and geography of books, cultural theory, and literary history to make visible a bookish array of alterative networks, genres, and locations that were obscured by the literary sphere in establishing its authority as arbiter of the modern book.

Alexander von Humboldt

Author: Beate I. Allert

Publisher: Purdue University Press

Published: 2023-07-15

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1612498302

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Alexander von Humboldt: Perceiving the World provides an interdisciplinary exploration into Humboldt’s approach to seeing and describing the many subjects he pursued. Though remembered primarily as an environmental thinker, Humboldt’s interests were vast and documented not just in his published works, but also in his extensive correspondence with scientists, artists, poets, and philosophers internationally. Perceiving the World covers Humboldt’s perceptions during intercontinental travels and scientific discoveries, as well as how he visualized nature, geography, environments, and diverse cultures, including Indigenous Peoples. This collection draws heavily on the English translations of Humboldt’s work housed in the Purdue University Archives, which were collected by John Purdue. The book is divided into three parts: Humboldt’s contributions to science since the nineteenth century; his work on nature, climates, environments, and the cosmos; and his lasting cultural impact, including his imaging techniques, modes of visual presentation, and contributions to the arts. Humboldt’s intricate approach to perception still resonates today, as his nuanced and unique way of seeing the world was just as important as what he wrote.

Romanticism and the Cultures of Infancy

Author: Martina Domines Veliki

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-08-29

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 3030504298

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This collection of essays explores the remarkable range and cultural significance of the engagement with ‘infancy’ during the Romantic period. Taking its point of departure in the commonplace claim that the Romantics invented childhood, the book traces that engagement across national boundaries, in the visual arts, in works of educational theory and natural philosophy, and in both fiction and non-fiction written for children. Essays authored by scholars from a range of national and disciplinary backgrounds reveal how Romantic-period representations of and for children constitute sites of complex discursive interaction, where ostensibly unrelated areas of enquiry are brought together through common tropes and topoi associated with infancy. Broadly new-historicist in approach, but drawing also on influential theoretical descriptions of genre, discipline, mediation, cultural exchange, and comparative methodologies, the collection also seeks to rethink the idea of a clear-cut dichotomy between Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of infancy.

Coleridge's Contemplative Philosophy

Author: Peter Cheyne

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-01-09

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0192592726

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

'PHILOSOPHY, or the doctrine and discipline of ideas' as S. T. Coleridge understood it, is the theme of this book. It considers the most vital and mature vein of Coleridge's thought to be the contemplation of ideas objectively, as existing powers. A theory of ideas emerges in critical engagement with thinkers including Plato, Plotinus, Böhme, Kant, and Schelling. A commitment to the transcendence of reason, central to what he calls the spiritual platonic old England, distinguishes him from his German contemporaries. The book also engages with Coleridge's poetry, especially in a culminating chapter dedicated to the Limbo sequence. This book pursues a theory of contemplation that draws from Coleridge's theories of imagination and the Ideas of Reason in his published texts and extensively from his thoughts as they developed throughout unpublished works, fragments, letters, and notebooks. He posited a hierarchy of cognition from basic sense intuition to the apprehension of scientific, ethical, and theological ideas. The structure of the book follows this thesis, beginning with sense data, moving upwards into aesthetic experience, imagination, and reason, with final chapters on formal logic and poetry that constellate the contemplation of ideas. Coleridge's Contemplative Philosophy is not just a work of history of philosophy, it addresses a figure whose thinking is of continuing interest, arguing that contemplation of ideas and values has consequences for everyday morality and aesthetics, as well as metaphysics. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, intellectual historians, scholars of religion, and of literature.

Making Stars Physical

Author: Stephen Case

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2018-11-03

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 0822986116

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Making Stars Physical offers the first extensive look at the astronomical career of John Herschel, son of William Herschel and one of the leading scientific figures in Britain throughout much of the nineteenth century. Herschel’s astronomical career is usually relegated to a continuation of his father, William’s, sweeps for nebulae. However, as Stephen Case argues, John Herschel was pivotal in establishing the sidereal revolution his father had begun: a shift of attention from the planetary system to the study of nebulous regions in the heavens and speculations on the nature of the Milky Way and the sun’s position within it. Through John Herschel’s astronomical career—in particular his work on constellation reform, double stars, and variable stars—the study of stellar objects became part of mainstream astronomy. He leveraged his mathematical expertise and his position within the scientific community to make sidereal astronomy accessible even to casual observers, allowing amateurs to make useful observations that could contribute to theories on the nature of stars. With this book, Case shows how Herschel’s work made the stars physical and laid the foundations for modern astrophysics.