Gregory Lynall is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool, UK. He is the author of Swift and Science: The Satire, Politics, and Theology of Natural Knowledge, 1690-1730 (2012).

• 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.

Gregory Lynall is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool, UK. He is the author of Swift and Science: The Satire, Politics, and Theology of Natural Knowledge, 1690-1730 (2012).

• 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.

Gregory Lynall is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool, UK. He is the author of Swift and Science: The Satire, Politics, and Theology of Natural Knowledge, 1690-1730 (2012).

• 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.