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 behaviour within, darkness, as well as examining literary chiaroscuros. Within each of four main chapters dedicated to the analysis of a single dominant light source in 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.

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.


Book Information
ISBN 9781786832689
Author Richard Leahy
Format Hardback
Page Count 288
Imprint University of Wales Press
Publisher University of Wales Press