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Reading into the Stars

Cosmopoetics in the Contemporary Novel

Klaeger, Florian

Anglistische Forschungen, Bd. 462

2018

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Abstract

(Mis-)readings of the stars and our place in the cosmos have long been used as a metaphor for reading fictional worlds: to speak of ‘reading into the stars’ is to acknowledge that the stargazer instils the otherwise empty sidereal text with meaning of their own making. By contrasting this activity with novel-reading, the trope of astro-eisegesis raises questions about the nature, potential, and functions of fiction. This amounts to a self-reflexive cosmopoetics of the novel employed by authors such as Martin Amis, John Banville, Andrew Crumey, Zadie Smith, and Jeanette Winterson, among many others. Tracing the development of the trope in narrative fictions since Chaucer and its uses in British and Irish novels since the Apollo moon landings, the book explores the epistemological, ontological and anthropological dimensions of novelistic cosmopoetics.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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Cover Cover
Titel-Page iii
Imprint iv
Contents v
List of Figures vii
Acknowledgements viii
Abbreviations Used ix
I Introduction 1
II Metaphorized Cosmology and Literature 25
II.1 Astroculture, Anthropicity, and Cosmology 26
II.2 Cosmology as Metaphor 40
II.3 Nonconceptuality and Literature 52
II.4 Metaphorized Cosmology as a Transgressional Trope 60
III The Cosmopoetics of the Novel 69
III.1 From Metaphorized Cosmology towards a Cosmopoetics 72
III.2 Epistemology and the Cosmopoetic Novel 89
III.3 Ontology and the Cosmopoetic Novel 100
III.4 Anthropology and the Cosmopoetic Novel 110
IV Metaphorized Cosmology in English Literary History 117
IV.1 Epic between Ptolemaism and Copernicanism 122
IV.2 The Emergence of the Novel in the Newtonian World 170
IV.3 The Novel in the Herschelian Universe 201
V Metaphorized Cosmology in the Contemporary Novel 253
V.1 The World in the Novel: Cosmopoetics and Epistemology 261
V.1.1 Characterization 269
V.1.2 Chronotope 285
V.1.3 Perspective 318
V.2 The Novel as World: Cosmopoetics and Ontology 339
V.2.1 Text-as-World 346
V.2.2 Meaning-making 355
V.2.3 Inter-subjectivity 365
V.3 The Novel in the World: Cosmopoetics and Anthropology 390
VI Cosmopoetics in the Contemporary Novel 425
Works Cited 444
Index 476
Backcover 480