The Last of the Light is a meditation on twilight in the Western arts and imagination, in thought, painting and literature. We entera multifaceted twilight world, filled with the gloom haunted by Romantic poets and painters and the twilight lives of minority and 'overshadowed' communities. The melancholy of smoky English autumn evenings is balanced by the midnight sun of northern European summers; the oppressive heat of August in mid-twentieth-century Spain is ranged against the shadowy grandeur of winter in London.Peter Davidson touches on diverse literary and artistic traditions as he considers the borderlands of the light and the dark: the'invention of evening' in Roman antiquity; the science of the Victorian evening sky; the urban twilights of Whistler, Poussinand Tiepolo.A meditative account of the atmospheric and shadowy in art, literature and thought by the author of The Idea of North, this will appeal to all those who are interested in ambiguous, penumbral zones in art, philosophy and writing.

About the Author
Peter Davidson is Fellow of Campion Hall, University of Oxford. He has taught at the universities of Aberdeen, Leiden and Warwick. He is the author of a book of essays about northern culture, Distance and Memory (2013), a collection of verse, The Palace of Oblivion (2008), and The Idea of North (2004, also from Reaktion).

Reviews
'What an astonishing book this is: a cartography of dusk, an illumination of twilight as it has found its ways into the art, literature, dreams, moods and metaphors of Europe and beyond. Beautiful and subtle in its tracings, it combines memoir, memory, place-writing and cultural history by degrees so fine as to be imperceptible.' - Robert Macfarlane, author of Landmarks, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot and Mountains of the Mind.



Book Information
ISBN 9781780235103
Author Peter Davidson
Format Hardback
Page Count 208
Imprint Reaktion Books
Publisher Reaktion Books