Air's appearance
Subtitle: British insular fiction and the rise of atmosphere, 1660-1794
By: Jayne Elizabeth Lewis
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press; University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Chicago; London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9780226476698; 9780226476711
Subjects: History and criticism; Weather in literature; English fiction
Description: In Air's Appearance, Jayne Elizabeth Lewis enlists her readers in pursuit of the elusive concept of atmosphere in literary works. She shows how diverse conceptions of air in the eighteenth century converged in British fiction, producing the modern literary sense of atmosphere and moving novelists to explore the threshold between material and immaterial worlds. Air's Appearance links the emergence of literary atmosphere to changing ideas about air and the earth's atmosphere in natural philosophy, as well as to the era's theories of the supernatural and fascination with social manners--or, as they are now known, "airs." Lewis thus offers a striking new interpretation of several standard features of the Enlightenment--the scientific revolution, the decline of magic, character-based sociability, and the rise of the novel--that considers them in terms of the romance of air that permeates and connects them. As it explores key episodes in the history of natural philosophy and in major literary works like Paradise Lost, "The Rape of the Lock," Robinson Crusoe, and The Mysteries of Udolpho, this book promises to change the atmosphere of eighteenth-century studies and the history of the novel.--Book jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Rounds of air; title: "Other air": Boyle's spring, Milton's fall, and the making of literary atmosphere; title: "Discontented air"; or, the Rape of the lock; title: Novel atmographies: eighteenth-century weather writing and the atmospheres of Robinson Crusoe; title: Spectral currencies and the air of reality in a Journal of the plague year; title: The dissipation of Tom Jones; title: Glanvill's ghost, cold sociability, and "the cure of Arabella's mind"; title: In factitious airs: Radcliffe's Priestley; title: Priestley's Radcliffe and the experimental gothic.