Anna Henchman

About

Anna Henchman is an Associate Professor of English at Boston University’s Kilachand Honors College. She specializes in Victorian literature, with a particular focus on poetry and the novel. Her work explores how literature represents or challenges the constraints of everyday perception, especially through the lens of 19th-century astronomy. Henchman’s first book, The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature, was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. This book examines literary experiments in point of view in connection with Victorian astronomy, highlighting how writers such as Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, Thomas De Quincey, and Alfred Tennyson engaged with the complex, constantly moving universe depicted by astronomers of the period. Her research investigates how these authors and astronomers grappled with the challenge of visualizing the universe from a terrestrial perspective, often enlisting readers to adopt radically different perceptions of the same object or event.

Research topics

• Astronomy
• Art
• History
• Physics
• Art history

Selected publications

• The Starry Sky Within

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2014-01-16 · 32 citations

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  Tracing unexplored connections between Victorian astronomy and literature, this book offers a new understanding of literary point of view as essentially multiple, mobile, and comparative. Nineteenth-century astronomy revealed a cosmos of celestial systems in constant motion. Stars, comets, planets, and moons coursed through space in complex and changing relation. As the skies were in motion, so too was the human subject. Astronomers showed that human beings never perceive the world from a stable…

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• The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature

  2014-01-16 · 22 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Introduction PART ONE: OBSERVERS IN MOTION 1. Astronomy, Optics, and Point of View 2. Thomas De Quincey's Disoriented Universe 3. Grief in Motion: Parallax and Orbing in Tennyson PART TWO: ASTRONOMY AND THE MULTIPLOT NOVEL Introduction: Novels as Celestial Systems 4. Hardy's Stargazers and the Astronomy of Other Minds 5. George Eliot and the Sweep of the Senses 6. Narratives on a Grand Scale: Astronomy and Narrative Space Conclusion Bibliography

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• Hardy's Stargazers and the Astronomy of Other Minds

  Victorian Studies · 2008-10-01 · 19 citations

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  This essay argues that Thomas Hardy compares the act of observing another person to the scientific practice of observing the stars in order to reveal structural obstacles to accessing other minds. He draws on astronomy and optics to underscore the discrepancy between the full perception one has of one's own consciousness and the lack of such sensory evidence for the consciousness of others. His scenes of stargazing show such obstacles being temporarily overcome; the stargazer turns away from the…

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• Hardy's Cliffhanger and Narrative Time

  English Language Notes · 2008-03-01 · 5 citations

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  Research Article| March 01 2008 Hardy's Cliffhanger and Narrative Time Anna Henchman Anna Henchman Boston University henchman@bu.edu Anna Henchman is a Junior Fellow at Harvard's Society of Fellows and an assistant professor in Boston University's English department. She is currently completing a book manuscript titled “The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century Literature,” which includes chapters on Thomas De Quincey, Tennyson, George Eliot, and Hardy. Her next pr…

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• The Telescope as Prosthesis

  Victorian review · 2009-09-01 · 3 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The Telescope as Prosthesis Anna Henchman (bio) In 1845, William Parsons, the Earl of Rosse, completed a 56-foot long reflector telescope with a 6-foot wide mirror that would remain the largest telescope in the world until 1917. Telescopes are not conventionally described as prostheses, a word that tends to refer to devices that supplement a lack, replacing or augmenting a part of the body that is in some way missing or defective. Yet by adding to what the human body can do, telescopes hold stro…

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