Populaire astronomie: voorstellingen van het heelal in Duitse en Britse tijdschriftcultuur, 1890 en 1945

In the summer of 1940, a letter from John M. appeared in the correspondence column of the UK's first specialist science fiction magazine. Lukens encouraged his fellow readers to preserve their copies of Tales of Wonder for an important purpose. "As we look back on To-morrow […] take our monthly season ticket to Mars," he wrote, "we can say to our grand-children: 'We knew about these things way back in the thirties—look at these magazines!'" (11). In this dissertation, I "look at these magazines" to trace non-specialist knowledge of astronomy as it evolved in mass-market magazines in the United Kingdom and Germany between 1890 and the Second World War. In particular, I ask how, and to what extent, these publications claim their own authority over the knowledge in their pages, and how this knowledge fits into the periodicals' ideological positioning. As such, this dissertation contributes a comparative and popular culture-oriented perspective on the modernist period to Literature and Science Studies, and bridges standard divide between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Periodical Studies. Chapter 1 studies Pearson's Magazine (1896-1939) between its founding in 1896 and the First World War. The astronomical fiction and non-fiction in Pearson's critiques the sensationalism of "the news" while using journalistic devices to "humanise" science. I show that Pearson's texts establish their authority over astronomy by critiquing the sensationalism or unreliability of the daily news. At the same time, Pearson's fiction depicts astronomy as requiring human interpretation over scientific expertise in order to become intelligible to the narrative; both "astronomy" and "the news," then, become less authoritative in favour of Pearson's itself. Moreover, Pearson's readers are empowered to conduct their own interpretation. Chapter 2 considers Bibliothek der Unterhaltung und des Wissens (1878-1962) from 1888 to 1918. The performance of astronomy in lectures or on stage is a recurring device in Bibliothek, and this is the feature of authority on which I focus in this chapter. In Bibliothek, I find that scientific authority is located in the authorised voices of fictional or non-fictional astronomers or explorers. Through re-mediated performances of science, Bibliothek is positioned as a library of lectures, preserving forms of knowledge even more ephemeral than the periodical, and placing the reader in the position of the learner. Chapter 3 studies The Boy's Own Paper (1879-1967) from 1889 to 1918. As a magazine expressly intended to mould young men into Christian, British citizens, the BOP has a more explicit ideological and didactic position than do either of the periodicals for adults studied here. This chapter hones in on how astronomy as presented in the BOP helps to authorise the magazine's ideological programme, and uncovers a contradiction at the heart of its representation. On the one hand, astronomy in the BOP is associated with adventures abroad in imperial spaces. When astronomy is practiced at home, though, it is associated with a sedentary, effeminate life. In the BOP, I find that astronomy writing endorses an active masculinity associated with the Victorian ideology of muscular Christianity, and astronomy is presented as easy to master for young readers. Chapter 4 moves past the First World War to study Das Neue Universum (1880-2002) from 1918 to 1944. In Germany, this period was marked by a strong politicisation of astronomy and polarisation between astronomical positions held by professionals and amateurs alike. In this heterogeneous scientific context, Das Neue Universum features numerous astronomical models in its fiction and non-fiction. What these texts have in common is the way that they identify these astronomies as German, and the outcome of their heroes experiments as triumphs for Germany. In Das Neue Universum, astronomy reserved for adventurous and highly trained adult characters. Young people reading DNU are instructed in astronomy, but not granted authority over it. Chapter 5 studies Tales of Wonder (1937-1942). The astronomy presented in Tales of Wonder is anachronistic for its time. Compared to the other magazines, Tales of Wonder stands out for adopting contemporary ideas about space travel but late-nineteenth century ideas about the planets and methods of observation. I argue that by (anachronistically) retaining the human eye and human experiences as the most important technology involved in space exploration, the science fiction writers and fans of the late 1930s and early 1940s crafted wonder and depicted a democratic astronomy in which laypeople's ideas had weight. More generally, my research found that in Germany and Britain, astronomical fiction was most concentrated between 1890 and 1910, falling into a period of popular 'Mars mania.' The aftereffects of this period's popular interest can be seen in the early science fiction after the First World War; writers' continuing interest in life in outer space and in space travel begins to cause fictional representations of astronomy to diverge from professional astronomy's contemporayr preoccupations. A major difference between the German and British magazines is that whereas the German magazines maintain a hierarchical approach to science communication, the British magazines tend to encourage their readers to believe that they, too, could contribute to science. Finally, throughout the texts studied in this dissertation, astronomy is associated with the future and the frontier as concepts that are inextricable from each other. The idea of space as the 'final frontier' that in many ways signifies 'the future' thus stretches back to astronomy--both professional and popular--of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.