Literature in the Age of Celestial Discovery

From Copernicus to Flamsteed

Judy A. Hayden

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137583451
• eBook ISBN: 9781137568038
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The reconfiguration and relinquishing of one's conviction in a world system long held to be finite required for many in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a compromise in one's beliefs and the biblical authority on which he or she had relied - and this did not come without serious and complex challenges. Advances in astronomy, such as the theories of Copernicus, the development of the telescope, and Galileo's discoveries and descriptions of the moon sparked intense debate in Early Modern literary discourse. The essays in this collection demonstrate that this discourse not only stimulated international discussion about lunar voyages and otherworldly habitation, but it also developed a political context in which these new discoveries and theories could correspond metaphorically to New World exploration and colonization, to socio-political unrest, and even to kingship and regicide.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series-Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “Faln Systemes” and “Dead Chim æ ras”
• 1 Heliocentrism, Plurality of Worlds and Ethics: Anton Francesco Doni and Giordano Bruno
• 2 Early Modern Space Travel and the English Man in the Moon
• 3 An English Renaissance Astronomy Club? Shakespeare, Observation and the Cosmos
• 4 To the Moon: Discovering the Comic in the Cosmic on the Early Modern English Stage
• 5 Sailing to the Moon: Francis Bacon, Francis Godwin and the First Science Fiction
• 6 The Royal Society, Collective Vision and Samuel Butler’s “The Elephant in the Moon”
• 7 “Cinthia’s Hero”: Edward Howard’s The Six days Adventure, or the New Utopia
• 8 “A new discovery of a new world”: The Moon and America in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century European Literature
• 9 Astronomy, Prophecy and Imposture in Tyssot de Patot’s Voyages et avantures de Jaques Massé
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index