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

《夜空：诗意的夜空》是一本关于1700-1917年间夜空诗歌的全书。虽然这些诗歌在启蒙时期和浪漫主义传统中随处可见，但从来没有成为系统研究的对象，尽管存在着广泛的山水诗歌批评书目。这本专著有两个部分。在第一部分《宇宙的崇高：测量不可估量的事物》中，我全面研究了牛顿时代的夜空诗，当时崇高话语和夜空的命运在英国诗学中交织在一起。这项研究的第二部分《城市之光的诗意平凡：浪漫主义传统中的城市夜-天空诗歌》，密切关注崇高夜空的照亮主题的浪漫传承，探索城市夜光普遍存在的诗意平凡，并聚焦于反复出现的诗意主题：人类创造的城市崇高如何威胁到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“宇宙崇高”的主题是，在牛顿综合的天文数学和崇高的贝尔莱特主义论述之间存在着惊人的亲和力，这种亲和力表明了崇高在将自然哲学转变为19世纪的科学学科中的作用。崇高的论述承担了神学的工作，然后是心理学的工作，这在早期是自然哲学家的领域的一部分。尤其是，18世纪早期关于天体崇高的讨论提供了一系列关于微积分惊人含义的思考，微积分是无限和无穷小级数的数学，它允许牛顿的数学断言所要求的外推，即天堂的法则是在地球上起作用的相同的法则。看风景的诗歌，无论是几何模式还是冥想模式，都依赖于并加强了诗人将风景组织成一个连贯的审美整体的能力，并基于人类认知和视觉场景之间存在某种互惠的假设。然而，对于仰望而不是向外看的夜空诗人来说，任务是将无法涵盖的东西塑造成诗意的形状：宇宙本身的无限。我认为，天空诗重新创作，适应并使用了地球上田园-地理传统的一般惯例。在18世纪后期，随着牛顿主义给落地诗人带来了新的问题和恐惧，夜空诗歌从一组关于普遍一致性的自信断言转变为对崇高体验的更麻烦、更世俗和更心理的表现。天空变成了一种奇怪的与头脑疏远的东西：不对等的，自然的，但没有人性的，矿物的，视觉上难以理解的。专著《城市灯光的诗意平凡》的后半部分探讨了浪漫传统中的城市灯光诗歌：这一部分讨论了天光和人类如何在浪漫传统中构建城市灯光/星星和路灯/争夺19世纪诗歌中的审美优势。这一研究反驳了华兹华斯通过艾略特对异化的现代生活的表现在城市诗歌中发现的批评视角。相反，它描绘了一个强大的传统，将城市的天空和灯光照明与主观自由和客观知识联系在一起。

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.