The Story Archive

Doctor Copernicus

John Banville · 1976 CE · Novel · English · Contemporary

A canon of Frauenburg cathedral spends his working life on administration, medicine and church politics while keeping to himself a scheme in which the earth moves, and the disciple who finally forces the thing into print is not a man he trusts. The prose carries him from a childhood of plague and a brother's disgrace to the cold Baltic tower where the observations are taken, and mostly guessed at. First of the Revolutions sequence on the scientific imagination, and the book that established him.

Open Doctor Copernicus in the archive — filters, lineage graph and full facet browsing.

Lineage

Attributes

Genre
HistoricalPsychological
Theme
Ambition & HubrisFaith & DoubtArt & CreationIsolation & AlienationAppearance vs Reality
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
CreatorEveryman
Plot structure
ChronicleRise and Fall
Quest object (Greimas)
Knowledge / Truth
Symbol / motif
The SunThe Book / ManuscriptThe Tower
Conflict
vs Selfvs Societyvs Fate / Gods
Mode / tone
ModernistIronicElegiac
Culture / tradition
English

Closest analogues