Loving Faster than Light
Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe
9780226680736
9780226680750
Loving Faster than Light
Romance and Readers in Einstein’s Universe
In November 1919, newspapers around the world alerted readers to a sensational new theory of the universe: Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Coming at a time of social, political, and economic upheaval, Einstein’s theory quickly became a rich cultural resource with many uses beyond physical theory. Media coverage of relativity in Britain took on qualities of pastiche and parody, as serious attempts to evaluate Einstein’s theory jostled with jokes and satires linking relativity to everything from railway budgets to religion. The image of a befuddled newspaper reader attempting to explain Einstein’s theory to his companions became a set piece in the popular press.
Loving Faster than Light focuses on the popular reception of relativity in Britain, demonstrating how abstract science came to be entangled with class politics, new media technology, changing sex relations, crime, cricket, and cinematography in the British imagination during the 1920s. Blending literary analysis with insights from the history of science, Katy Price reveals how cultural meanings for Einstein’s relativity were negotiated in newspapers with differing political agendas, popular science magazines, pulp fiction adventure and romance stories, detective plots, and esoteric love poetry. Loving Faster than Light is an essential read for anyone interested in popular science, the intersection of science and literature, and the social and cultural history of physics.
280 pages | 6 halftones, 9 line drawings | 6 x 9 | © 2012
Literature and Literary Criticism: British and Irish Literature
Physical Sciences: History and Philosophy of Physical Sciences
Reviews
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
A Note on Money
A Note on Money
Introduction
1 Light Caught Bending: Relativity in the Newspapers
2 Einstein for the Tired Business Man: Exposition in Magazines
3 Cracks in the Cosmos: Space and Time in Pulp Fiction
4 A Lady on Neptune: Arthur Eddington’s Talkative Universe
5 A Freak Sort of Planet: Dorothy L. Sayers’s Cosmic Bachelors
6 Talking to Mars: William Empson’s Astronomy Love Poems
Conclusion: Dreaming the Future
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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