Download or read book Through the Daemon s Gate written by Dean Swinford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tells the story of the early modern astronomer Johannes Kepler’s Somnium, which has been regarded by science historians and literary critics alike as the first true example of science fiction. Kepler began writing his complex and heavily-footnoted tale of a fictional Icelandic astronomer as an undergraduate and added to it throughout his life. The Somnium fuses supernatural and scientific models of the cosmos through a satirical defense of Copernicanism that features witches, lunar inhabitants, and a daemon who speaks in the empirical language of modern science. Swinford’s looks at the ways that Kepler’s Somnium is influenced by the cosmic dream, a literary genre that enjoyed considerable popularity among medieval authors, including Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante, John of Salisbury, Macrobius, and Alan of Lille. He examines the generic conventions of the cosmic dream, also studying the poetic and theological sensibilities underlying the categories of dreams formulated by Macrobius and Artemidorus that were widely used to interpret specific symbols in dreams and to assess their overall reliability. Swinford develops a key claim about the form of the Somnium as it relates to early science: Kepler relies on a genre that is closely connected to a Ptolemaic, or earth-centered, model of the cosmos as a way of explaining and justifying a model of the cosmos that does not posit the same connections between the individual and the divine that are so important for the Ptolemaic model. In effect, Kepler uses the cosmic dream to describe a universe that cannot lay claim to the same correspondences between an individual’s dream and the order of the cosmos understood within the rules of the genre itself. To that end, Kepler’s Somnium is the first example of science fiction, but the last example of Neoplatonic allegory.

Download or read book Terraforming The Creating of Habitable Worlds written by Martin Beech and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-04-21 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The word ‘‘terraforming’’ conjures up many exotic images and p- hapsevenwildemotions,butatitscoreitencapsulatestheideathat worldscanbechangedbydirecthumanaction.Theultimateaimof terraforming is to alter a hostile planetary environment into one that is Earth-like, and eventually upon the surface of the new and vibrant world that you or I could walk freely about and explore. It is not entirely clear that this high goal of terraforming can ever be achieved, however, and consequently throughout much of thisbooktheterraformingideasthatarediscussedwillapplytothe goal of making just some fraction of a world habitable. In other cases,theterraformingdescribedmightbeaimedatmakingaworld habitablenotforhumansbutforsomepotentialfoodsourcethat,of course, could be consumed by humans. The many icy moons that reside within the Solar System, for example, may never be ideal locationsforhumanhabitation,buttheypresentthegreatpotential for conversion into enormous hydroponic food-producing centers. The idea of transforming alien worlds has long been a literary backdrop for science fiction writers, and many a make-believe planet has succumbed to the actions of direct manipulation and the indomitable grinding of colossal machines. Indeed, there is something both liberating and humbling about the notion of tra- forming another world; it is the quintessential eucatastrophy espoused by J. R. R. Tolkien, the catastrophe that ultimately brings about a better world. When oxygen was first copiously produced by cyanobacterial activity on the Earth some three billion years ago, it was an act of extreme chemical pollution and a eucatastrophy. The original life-nurturing atmosphere was (eventually) changed f- ever, but an atmosphere that could support advanced life forms came about.

Download or read book MLN written by and published by . This book was released on 1896 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Poetical Works written by John Milton and published by . This book was released on 1882 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Poetical Works of John Milton written by John Milton and published by . This book was released on 1882 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Great Dictionary English Finnish written by Benjamin Maximilian Eisenhauer and published by Benjamin Maximilian Eisenhauer. This book was released on with total page 6161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dictionary contains around 80,000 English terms with their Finnish translations, making it one of the most comprehensive books of its kind. It offers a wide vocabulary from all areas as well as numerous idioms. The terms are translated from English to Finnish. If you need translations from Finnish to English, then the companion volume The Great Dictionary Finnish - English is recommended.

Download or read book Poetical Works written by John Milton and published by . This book was released on 1874 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Paradise regained and Samson agonistes written by John Milton and published by . This book was released on 1893 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Poetical Works of John Milton written by David Masson and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-12-30 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reprint of the original, first published in 1874.

Download or read book Paradise regained Samson Agonistes Essay on Milton s English and versification written by John Milton and published by . This book was released on 1882 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry written by Henry Headley and published by . This book was released on 1810 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Paradise regained Samson Agonistes Essay on Milton s English and versification Notes to the poems written by John Milton and published by . This book was released on 1893 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Chaucer s Queer Poetics written by Susan Schibanoff and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Geoffrey Chaucer was arguably fourteenth-century England's greatest poet. In the nineteenth century, readers of Chaucer's early dream poems - the Book of the Duchess, House of Fame, and Parliament of Fowles - began to detect a tripartite model of his artistic development from a French to an Italian, and finally to an English phase. They fleshed out this model with the liberation narrative, the inspiring story of how Chaucer escaped the emasculating French house of bondage to become the generative father of English poetry. Although this division has now largely been dismissed, both the tripartite model and the accompanying liberation narrative persist in Chaucer criticism. In Chaucer's Queer Poetics, Susan Schibanoff interrogates why the tripartite model remains so tenacious even when literary history does not support it. Revealing deeply rooted Francophobic, homophobic, and nationalistic biases, Schibanoff examines the development paradigm and demonstrates that 'liberated Chaucer' depends on antiquated readings of key source texts for the dream trilogy. This study challenges the long held view the Chaucer fled the prison of effete French court verse to become the 'natural' English father poet and charts a new model of Chaucerian poetic development that discovers the emergence of a queer aesthetic in his work.

Download or read book Literature Politics and National Identity written by Andrew Hadfield and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-06-23 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A challenging reinterpretation of the sixteenth century through the work of major writers of the time.

Download or read book A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles written by James Augustus Henry Murray and published by . This book was released on 1919 with total page 1240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Pseudonymous Shakespeare written by Penny McCarthy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation into modes of early modern English literary 'indirection,' this study could also be considered a detective work on a pseudonym attached to some late sixteenth-century works. In the course of unmasking 'R.L.', McCarthy scrutinizes devices employed by writers in the Sidney coterie: punning, often across languages; repetitio-insistence on a sound, or hiding two persons 'under one hood'; disingenuous juxtaposition; evocation of original context; differential spelling (intended and significant). Among McCarthy's stunning-but solidly underpinned-conclusions are: Shakespeare used the pseudonym 'R.L.' among other pseudonyms; one, 'William Smith', was also his 'alias' in life; Shakespeare was at the heart of the Sidney circle, whose literary programme was hostile to Elizabeth I; and his work, composed mainly from the late 1570s to the early 90s, occasionally 'embedded' in the work of others, was covertly alluded to more often than has been recognized.

Download or read book The Great Dictionary English French written by Benjamin Maximilian Eisenhauer and published by Benjamin Maximilian Eisenhauer. This book was released on with total page 10679 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dictionary contains around 130,000 English terms with their French translations, making it one of the most comprehensive books of its kind. It offers a wide vocabulary from all areas as well as numerous idioms. The terms are translated from English to French. If you need translations from French to English, then the companion volume The Great Dictionary French - English is recommended.