Del i serien Explorations in Science and Literature

Imagining Solar Energy

The Power of the Sun in Literature, Science and Culture

Inbunden, Engelska, 2020

AvGregory Lynall,Lara Choksey

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Shortlisted for the 2022 ESSE Book Awards How has humanity sought to harness the power of the Sun, and what roles have literature, art and other cultural forms played in imagining, mythologizing and reflecting the possibilities of solar energy? What stories have been told about solar technologies, and how have these narratives shaped developments in science and culture? What can solar power’s history tell us about its future, within a world adapting to climate crisis? Identifying the history of capturing solar radiance as a focal point between science and the imagination, Imagining Solar Energy argues that the literary, artistic and mythical resonances of solar power – from the Renaissance to the present day – have not only been inspired by, but have also cultivated and sustained its scientific and technological development. Ranging from Archimedes to Isaac Asimov, John Dee to Humphry Davy, Aphra Behn to J. G. Ballard, the book argues that solar energy translates into many different kinds of power (physical, political, intellectual and cultural), and establishes for the first time the importance of solar energy to many literary and scientific endeavours.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2020-02-20
Mått156 x 234 x undefined mm
Vikt585 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieExplorations in Science and Literature
Antal sidor296
FörlagBloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN9781350010970
UtmärkelserShort-listed for ESSE (European Society for the Study of English) Book Award 2022 (United States)

Tillhör följande kategorier

Litteraturteori inom Skönlitteratur
Litteraturvetenskap inom Skönlitteratur
Naturvetenskap:allmänt inom Naturvetenskap och teknik

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Bringing the Sun into Focus1. Solar Renaissance: Through the Burning-Glass2. Bundling up the Sun-Beams: Burning into the Enlightenment3. Feeling the Promethean Heat: Romantic Radiance and the Power of Invisible Light4. A Time of ‘Solidified Sunshine’: Victorian Imaginaries of Solar Energy5. Bright Futures: Solar Science Fiction Takes Off6. Dark Mirrors: Solar Reflections in the Nuclear Age7. Self-Renewable: The Satire and Psycho-thermodynamics of SolarSelected Bibliography

Greg Lynall’s Imagining Solar Energy is worth every metaphor of sunlight a reader might consider. It is a dazzling achievement: an intellectual highlight of recent literature and science scholarship that illuminates so much of our imaginative relationship to the sun across a stretch of time from the Renaissance to the present moment. Political in its interventions and global in its conceptualisations Imagining Solar Energy is also detailed, exacting, comprehensive. Taking in early seventeenth century pamphlets decrying renewable energy and twenty-first century solarpunk fictions wrestling with climate change Lynall offers a rich collection of entangled scientific, literary and cultural readings of the sun’s dangerous and restorative power. Striking for its erudition across solar sciences as well as literary periods, it will impress, too, for the eloquence of its environmental interventions.