Hemispheres and Stratospheres

The Idea and Experience of Distance in the International Enlightenment

Kevin L. Cope (Ed.)

2020
252 pages
$44.95
ISBN 9781684482016
Transits

Nowhere is distance so near-at-hand as in Enlightenment culture. Whether in the telescopic surveys of early astronomers, the panoramas of painters, the diaries of travelers, the prospects of landscape architects, or the tales of novelists, distance is never far in the background of the works and deeds of long-eighteenth-century artists, authors, and adventurers. Hemispheres and Stratospheres draws that background into the foreground. Recognizing distance as a central concern of the Enlightenment, this volume offers eight essays on distance in art and literature; on cultural transmission and exchange over distance; and on distance as a topic in science, a theme in literature, and a central issue in modern research methods. Through studies of landscape gardens, architecture, imaginary voyages, transcontinental philosophical exchange, and cosmological poetry, Hemispheres and Stratospheres unfurls the early history of a distance culture that influences our own era of global information exchange, long-haul flights, colossal skyscrapers, and space tourism.

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Reviews

"Kevin Cope's groundbreaking edited collection on distance in Hemispheres and Stratospheres challenges, in eight wide-ranging essays by prominent scholars, how researchers on the Enlightenment and long eighteenth century need to reassess the interdisciplinary nature, cultural richness, and international scope of this topic. Few books strive for encyclopedic range on topics that have eluded philosophers, natural scientists, architects, poets, novelists, priests, and scholars in the past and in the electronic age. But Cope's interdisciplinary study ventures into new territories in the international and cultural terrain of distance studies, uncovering uncharted research and future prospects on this topic in the digital humanities."
- Mark Pedreira, Professor of English, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras

"A moment's thought on a few classic Enlightenment interests - travel, measurement, optics, history, cartography, social class, and cultural comparison, for example - will suggest the centrality of the idea of distance, and yet we have little sustained scholarship on the subject. With his characteristic intellectual amplitude, Kevin L. Cope presents in this volume essays on the eighteenth-century 'prospect' in art and literature, the function of distance in Italian architecture, the European travel of two South Indian priests, the dislocations and adaptations of 'long distance' imaginary voyages, and the possible advantages of 'distant' reading - among others. While novel in its core supposition, the volume pays respect to an older, distinguished scholarly orientation that is perfectly in line with our own multidisciplinary moment: the history of ideas."
- John Scanlan, coeditor of The Age of Johnson

About the editor:

Kevin L. Cope is the Adams Professor of English Literature at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. The author of Criteria of Certainty, John Locke Revisited, and In and After the Beginning, Cope has edited a panoply of volumes on topics such as the imaginative representations of the sciences, the iconic status of George Washington, miracle lore in the Enlightenment, and the profusion of information during the Enlightenment. Since 1992, he has edited 1650 - 1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era. Cope is a frequent guest and commentator on radio and television programming concerned with higher education management and policy.

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Cloth: $120.00, 9781684482023; PDF: $44.95, 9781684482054; EPUB: $44.95, 9781684482030