This little guidebook, Astronomy for English Majors, is meant to help students majoring in English literature or other fields in the Humanities to learn what they need to know about the sky. What goes on there, especially the movements of the celestial bodies at night, often carries important meanings in poetry and literary prose. Every year in my Romantic poetry course at the University of New Hampshire I have found students who are unable to determine why the sun, moon, planets, stars, or comets appear in a poem and whether they carry symbolic meanings or simply indicate the season or time of day; often my students are unsure how these bodies behave in the real sky. Many students cannot say, for example, whether the full moon is ever visible at noon. And some of them live in the countryside or small towns, where they have frequent opportunities to observe the clear night sky unpolluted by city lights. Even those, however, who understand the positions of the moon and sun during the moon’s phases have not encountered the ancient theory of the celestial spheres, the seven “planets” (which included the sun and moon), and astrological “influence,” a set of beliefs of great importance for literature even after Copernicus and Galileo overthrew it. This book is for them.
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