Fr. 140.00

My Dark Room - Spaces of the Inner Self in Eighteenth-Century England

English · Hardback

Shipping usually within 1 to 3 weeks (not available at short notice)

Description

Read more










"In what kinds of spaces do we become most aware of the thoughts in our own heads? My Dark Room is a book about the intimate sites of inner experience in eighteenth-century England and their role in the rise both of interiority and the novel. Julie Park considers sites such as grottos, cottages, closets, and especially the camera obscura, that beguiling enclosure into which the outside world is projected through a lens. This type of "dark room" and the projections within it serve Park as a paradigm for the fleeting states of interiority that eighteenth-century figures felt compelled to generate and experience. Park integrates material analyses of these "interior" spaces with close readings of novelistic and proto-novelistic texts. Taken together, these case studies amount to a fresh narrative of the novel's development as a genre of interiority from 1650 to 1811. They include Andrew Marvell's country house poem, Upon Appleton House; Margaret Cavendish's loosely fictional letters about domestic life, Sociable Letters, and the utopian fantasy/critique of the new science, The Blazing World; and Alexander Pope's long poem, Eloisa to Abelard. Park's innovative method of "spatial formalism" reveals how physical settings enable psychic interiors to achieve vitality in fictive and real lives"--

About the author










Julie Park is the Paterno Family Librarian for Literature and professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England and coeditor of Organic Supplements: Bodies and Things of the Natural World, 1580-1790.

Customer reviews

No reviews have been written for this item yet. Write the first review and be helpful to other users when they decide on a purchase.

Write a review

Thumbs up or thumbs down? Write your own review.

For messages to CeDe.ch please use the contact form.

The input fields marked * are obligatory

By submitting this form you agree to our data privacy statement.