Writing a Cosmos: Modernist Popular Astronomy in British and German Prose Fiction
Popular Astronomy is a subproject of the larger research programme, Literary Knowledge, 1890-1950: Modernisms and the Sciences in Europe, funded by the KU Leuven Research Council. This project aims to arrive at a better understanding of the epistemic function of British and German literature within a European context in the modernist period (1890-1950). More specifically, it seeks to comprehend how writers responded to the new astronomical discoveries and interpretations of the universe, which had been accelerating in the course of the 19th century . These interpretations principally reorganised not only the understanding of time and space, but spurred re-interpretations of dichotomous relations such as ratio-myth, totality-particularity and, consequently, objectivity-subjectivity as well. While astronomy (and cosmology) and literature are usually thought of in terms of science fiction, there is, in fact, a far greater variety of narrative fiction that absorbed, mediated and disseminated cosmological knowledge in the modernist period, ranging from short stories in magazines and newspapers to epic narratives and tragedy, or in the form of adventure stories, detective fiction, mystery novels, romances, or historical novels. This thesis aims to analyse the different popular genres and narrative conventions—story plot, characters, narrative structure, temporal sequencing, generic norms—that were used to represent, disseminate and re-imagine new as well as old astronomical observations and technologies