The Sky at Night: Celestial Phenomena in Englsh Poetry, 1700-1917

夜晚的天空：英国诗歌中的天体现象，1700-1917 年

• 批准号: AH/E004350/1
• 负责人: Anne Janowitz
• 金额: $ 4.04万
• 依托单位: Queen Mary University of London
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2007 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FE004350%2F1
• 关键词: Sky; Night; Celestial; Phenomena; Englsh

THE SKY AT NIGHT: POETIC COMMPLACES OF THE NIGHT SKY, is a book-length study of night sky poetry, 1700-1917. Although ubiquitous in the enlightenment period and in the romantic tradition, these poems have never been the subject of systematic study, even though there exists a extensive critical bibliography on landscape poetry more generally. The monograph has two parts. In the first part, 'The Cosmic Sublime: Measuring the Immeasurable,' I offer a comprehensive study of the range of night-sky poems in the age of Newton, when the fortunes of the discourse of the sublime and of the night-sky were significantly interwoven in English poetics. The second part of the study, 'The Poetic Commonplace of Urban Light: Urban Night-Sky Poetry in the Romantic Tradition,' looks closely at the romantic inheritance of the enlightement topics of the sublime night sky, exploring the widespread poetic commonplace of urban night light, and focussing on the repeated poetic theme of how the human creation of an urban sublime threatens the supremacy of the natural sublime. One of the central research hypotheses of this project, and the subject of part I, 'The Cosmic Sublime' is that there is a striking affinity between the astronomical mathematics of the Newtonian synthesis and the belle-lettristic discourse of the sublime, an affinity that suggests the sublime's role in the transformations of natural philosophy into the scientific disciplines of the nineteenth century. The discourse of the sublime took on the theological and then psychological work that had earlier been part of the domain of natural philosophers. In particular, early eighteenth century discussions of the celestial sublime offered a set of reflections on the astonishing implications of the calculus, the mathematics of both infinite and infinitesimal series that allowed for the extrapolations required by Newton's mathematic assertions that the laws of the heavens were the same laws that worked on earth.The landscape poetry of looking, in both its georgic and meditative modes, depended upon and reinforced the poet's ability to organise the vista into a coherent aesthetic whole, and worked upon the assumption that there was some reciprocity between human cognition and the visual scene. For the poet of the night sky, however, who looks up, not out, the task is to make a poetic shape out of something that cannot be encompassed: the infinitude of the universe itself. I argue that skypoems rework and accommodate and use the generic conventions of the pastoral-georgic tradition of the earth. In the course of the later eighteenth century, as Newtonianism raises new problems and terrors for the earth-bound poet, the poetry of the night sky shifts from a confident set of assertions about universal coherence to a more troubled, secular, and psychological representation of the experience of sublimity. The sky-scape becomes something strangely alienated from the mind: unreciprocal, natural yet inhuman, mineral, visually unintelligible. The second half of the monograph, 'The Poetic Commonplace of Urban Light' discusses the poetry of city lights in the romantic tradition: this part is concerned with the way in which heavenly light and humanly constructed urban light / stars and streetlight / compete for aesthetic superiority in 19century poetry in the romantic tradition.The study offers a rebuttal of the critical perspective that finds in urban poetry from Wordsworth through Eliot the representation of alienated modern life. It maps out instead a robust tradition that associates the illumination of the city from both sky and lamp with subjective freedom and objective knowledge.

《夜空：夜空的诗意替代品》（The Sky AT Night：Poetic Commplaces OF THE Night Sky）是一本研究夜空诗歌的书，1700-1917年。虽然在启蒙时期和浪漫主义传统中无处不在，但这些诗歌从未成为系统研究的主题，尽管存在广泛的关于风景诗的评论书目。该专著有两个部分。在第一部分，“宇宙的崇高：测量不可测量的，“我提供了一个全面的研究范围的夜空诗在牛顿时代，当命运的话语的崇高和夜空是显着交织在英国诗学。研究的第二部分，“城市之光的诗意平凡：浪漫主义传统中的城市夜空诗歌”，密切关注崇高夜空的启蒙主题的浪漫传承，探索城市夜景的普遍诗意平凡，并专注于重复的诗意主题，即人类创造的城市崇高如何威胁自然崇高的至高无上。这个项目的中心研究假设之一，也是第一部分“宇宙的崇高”的主题，是牛顿综合的天文数学与崇高的文学话语之间有着惊人的相似性，这种相似性表明崇高在自然哲学向19世纪科学学科的转变中所起的作用。关于崇高的论述首先是神学的工作，然后是心理学的工作，这些工作在早期是自然哲学家的领域的一部分。特别是，世纪早期关于天体崇高的讨论提供了对微积分惊人含义的一系列思考，微积分是无穷级数和无穷小级数的数学，允许牛顿数学断言所要求的外推，即天空的定律与地球上的定律相同。它依赖并加强了诗人将景色组织成一个连贯的美学整体的能力，并假设人类认知和视觉场景之间存在某种相互作用。然而，对于仰望夜空而不是向外看的诗人来说，任务是从无法涵盖的东西中创造出诗意的形状：宇宙本身的无限性。我认为，天空诗返工，适应和使用地球的田园georgic传统的通用公约。在世纪后期，牛顿为这位生活在大地上的诗人提出了新的问题和恐惧，夜空的诗歌从一套关于普遍一致性的自信断言转向一种对崇高体验的更麻烦、世俗和心理的表现。天空景观变成了一种奇怪的东西，与心灵疏远：不相互的，自然但不人道，矿物，视觉上无法理解。专着《城市之光的诗意平凡》的后半部分讨论了浪漫主义传统中城市灯光的诗意：这一部分是关于天堂之光和人类建造的城市之光/星星和路灯/19世纪浪漫主义诗歌传统中的城市诗歌与城市诗歌在美学上的竞争，本研究对华兹华斯的城市诗歌批评视角进行了反驳通过艾略特对异化的现代生活的再现。相反，它描绘了一个强大的传统，将城市的天空和灯光与主观自由和客观知识联系起来。