Stephen’s Telescopic Imagination: Geography, Astronomy, and Spatial Analytics in A Portrait

Abstract

This essay considers possible sources for Stephen's list of coordinates in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, suggesting that an intertext with the work of English astronomer Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer (1836-1920) provides not only a credible template but also a mode of imaginative "telescoping" that enables Stephen to develop imaginative "flight" as a complement to empirical, terrestrial observation and experience.