Air's Appearance

by Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth

• ISBN13: 9780226476698
• ISBN10: 0226476693
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-11-22
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

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 Appearancelinks 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.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Rounds of Air	p. 14
"Other Air": Boyle's Spring, Milton's Fall, and the Making of Literary Atmosphere	p. 36
"Discontented Air"; or, The Rape of the Lock	p. 61
Novel Atmographies: Eighteenth-Century Weather Writing and the Atmospheres of Robinson Crusoe	p. 92
Spectral Currencies and the Air of Reality in A Journal of the Plague Year	p. 111
The Dissipation of Tom Jones	p. 130
GlanvillÆs Ghost, Cold Sociability, and "the Cure of Arabella's Mind"	p. 161
In Factitious Airs: Radcliffe's Priestley	p. 190
Priestley's Radcliffe and the Experimental Gothic	p. 219
Notes	p. 251
Index	p. 289
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