Literary Illumination: The Evolution of Artificial Light in Nineteenth Century Literature

by Richard Leahy

Overview

Literary Illumination examines the relationship between literature and artificial illumination, demonstrating that developments of lighting technology during the nineteenth century definitively altered the treatment of light as symbol, metaphor, and textual motif. Correspondingly, the book also engages with the changing nature of darkness, and how the influence of artificial light altered both public perceptions of, and behavior within, darkness, as well as examining literary 'chiaroscuros'. Within each of four main chapters dedicated to the analysis of a single dominant light source within the long nineteenth-century—firelight, candlelight, gaslight, and electric light—the author considers the phenomenological properties of the light sources, and where their presence would be felt most strongly in the nineteenth century, before collating a corpus of texts for each light source and environment.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786832689
Publisher:	University of Wales Press
Publication date:	02/15/2019
Series:	Intersections in Literature and Science
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Richard Leahy is Lecturer in English at the University of Chester, and his research interests include the nineteenth century, technology and literature, and techniques of illumination.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Nineteenth-Century Lightscape 1

1 Firelight 9

1.1 Nineteenth-Century Firelight: Hearth, Home and Industry 10

1.2 Gaskell, Dickens, Fire and Reverie: The Domestic and the Individual 18

1.3 Variable Flames in Urban Domesticity 28

1.4 Fire and Reverie in Industrial Desperation 38

2 Candlelight 49

2.1 A Brief History of Candlelight: An Ancient Light in the Nineteenth Century 50

2.2 Candle Theory and its Symbolic Value in Literature 53

2.3 The Candle and the Literary Detective 60

2.4 The Candle and the Gothic Unknown 71

2.5 The Candle and Ambiguity of Mental States 82

3 Gaslight 91

3.1 Gaslight in the Nineteenth Century 92

3.2 The Networked City: Gaslight on Literary Streets 103

3.3 The Theatre: Gaslight's Stage 114

3.4 The Department Store: Gaslight's Dressing Room 126

4 Electric Light 137

4.1 Electric Light in the Nineteenth Century: Evolution and Revolution 138

4.2 Jules Verne's prophetic electric light of the 1860s and 1870s 149

4.3 The Transient Light of H. G. Wells's Fin-de-Siècle 162

4.4 Electric Light 1900-14: Realisation and Realism 174

Summary and Conclusions 183

The Lightscape of the Early Twentieth Century: Why Stop Here? 189

The Key Ideas: Blurring of Archetypes, Modernity and the Individual 193

Notes 197

Bibliography 221

Index 239