TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction - Jayne Elizabeth Lewis
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226476711.003.0001
[atmosphere, literary atmosphere, Royal Society, William Empson, John Wilkins, atmospheric writing]
When a literary work is said to have a certain “atmosphere” about it, it is possible to link this experience to the founding of the Royal Society in 1660, where air became visible as an object of knowledge. This chapter, then, provides an introduction to the idea of literary atmosphere—which, in relation to books, speaks of mood and voice; but to an eighteenth-century reader such as William Empson, might be a mode of being that is someway fundamentally conveyed as a by-product of meaning. John Wilkins’ atmospheric writing takes a somewhat literal approach, but also captures the inevitably mediated nature of what surrounds us. Pinning the term down, however, would be elusive. In this chapter, the author aims to answer the question of what literary atmosphere might entail through the process of a broad historical approach. (pages 1 - 13)
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Rounds of Air - Jayne Elizabeth Lewis
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226476711.003.0002
[modern meteorology, Samuel Johnson, Isaac Watts, modern novel, Logick, Dictionary]
Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) gives a definition of “AIR” in an attempt to capture its complete complexity and essence. With the nature of air being invisible—a trait common with God and other elements—this definition falls flat as merely words that work to make “air” apparent. So difficult was the task that Johnson turned to hymnodist Isaac Watts in his Logick for answers, answers that Watts could not provide. Watts looked at several aspects of what air might be: as matter or as fluid. The author then discusses air’s relationship to the written word, and how the discussion of its properties and limits shaped modern meteorology and the modern novel. For Watts and Johnson, a lesson was learned. Instead of asking what air is, they proposed to question the possibility of saying anything about air at all. (pages 14 - 35)
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“Other Air”: Boyle’s Spring, Milton’s Fall, and the Making of Literary Atmosphere - Jayne Elizabeth Lewis
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226476711.003.0003
[literary atmosphere, Robert Boyle, John Milton, Paradise Lost, literary experiment, natural philosophy, air pump]
This chapter examines the works of Robert Boyle and John Milton in an exploration of the definition of literary atmosphere. A closer study of Paradise Lost reveals that Adam and Eve’s loss of Eden also resulted in a loss of “pure” air. Satan is portrayed as having experienced Eve’s “air” in an atmospheric sense, and Milton invokes this experience of air repeatedly—which in the end creates both an obstruction and a condition of experience. In effect, Milton’s work and “air” are the result of an age of literary experiment that would cohere with a larger body of new experiments in natural philosophy. In the case of Boyle, his purpose was to show that matter was all there was to it, endowing air with physical attributes of weight through a visualizing machine: the air pump. The chapter explores, then, how Milton and Boyle influenced the discussion that brought forth the making of literary atmosphere. (pages 36 - 60)
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“Discontented Air”; or, The Rape of the Lock - Jayne Elizabeth Lewis
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226476711.003.0004
[natural knowledge, Cleanth Brooks, John Arbuthnot, Alexander Pope, Rape of Lock, literary experience]
Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock was the closest he would come to being a “poet of nature.” Through his work, Pope brought a world of pretenses—the “airs” that human beings affect. Sixty years later, his crony John Arbuthnot distinguished air by its facile passage between what we shape and see, and what we do not. It is Pope that invited us to think that if planets can have atmosphere, cannot a poem have one too? Cleanth Brook’s study of The Rape of the Lock questions what it means for a literary work to be “know bathed in an atmosphere.” Even as we somehow “know” what “bathed in an atmosphere” means, does that make social convention and literary experience legitimate foundations of natural knowledge? (pages 61 - 91)
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Novel Atmographies: Eighteenth-Century Weather Writing and the Atmospheres of Robinson Crusoe - Jayne Elizabeth Lewis
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226476711.003.0005
[atmospheric dimension, Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Reality of Apparitions, weather writing, English weather writing]
Daniel Defoe’s turbulent prose gives away his personal interest toward what he termed “the History and Reality of Apparitions,” not to mention his apparent interest in weather—both of which can be gleaned from his influential Robinson Crusoe. This and another of Defoe’s works, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), both contain an expanse of environment and atmosphere that ushered British literary fiction into a new wave. Robinson Crusoe’s eponymous protagonist is shown to have a keen obsession with the bewildering atmospheric events occurring about him. In him is such a need to master the cycle of the seasons and decipher what it is that God is trying to tell him that he begins writing a journal to chronicle the weather. In this chapter, then, the author takes a deeper look at the atmospheric dimension of Robinson Crusoe in light of contemporary English weather writing. (pages 92 - 110)
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Spectral Currencies and the Air of Reality in A Journal of the Plague Year - Jayne Elizabeth Lewis
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226476711.003.0006
[plague of 1665, Defoe, protogothic necropolis, Apparitions, Plague Year, English air, Robinson Crusoe, Defoe’s realism]
This chapter takes a look at the supernatural properties of air as Daniel Defoe wove them into the lexical fabric of his A Journal of the Plague Year. After the publication of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe focused his attention on English air, particularly in relation to the plague of 1665. In fact, his Journal can be certified as a modern piece of atmospheric fiction. The author examines the history of the its reception, and whether it can be counted as history—questioning whether the more graphic portrayals that compose it can be considered either fact or fiction. This is especially important due to the protogothic necropolis overrun with “Apparitions” that Defoe himself writes of in A Journal. As such, it is the question of Defoe’s realism that the chapter aims to possibly expound upon and answer. (pages 111 - 129)
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The Dissipation of Tom Jones - Jayne Elizabeth Lewis
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226476711.003.0007
[great shocks, Thomas Sherlock, British book trade, Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, sexual politics, Licensing Act 1737]
The “great Shocks” which convulsed London in the winter of 1749 caught the eye of literary scholars, especially as Anglican bishop Thomas Sherlock interpreted and announced them as a sign that God had condemned the British book trade. Sherlock mentioned no particular author in particular, although one principal offender is often presumed to have been Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones—a fiction whose main sin was an unbecoming appetite for low life. Tom Jones contained in its pages a sense of slippery sexual politics, one of the factors that drove it from the stage with the Licensing Act of 1737. Throughout the chapter, the author examines the criticism garnered by Fielding’s work, and how its resonance in literature affected the discussion of air and atmosphere. (pages 130 - 160)
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Glanvill’s Ghost, Cold Sociability, and “the Cure of Arabella’s Mind” - Jayne Elizabeth Lewis
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226476711.003.0008
[female Quixote, Arabella, Charlotte Lennox, Catherine Gallagher, Arabella’s Mind, modern literary realism, atmosphere, sensory possibility]
Charlotte Lennox’s female Quixote, Arabella, emerged on the London literary scene just three years after Tom Jones. This chapter first discusses the conversion of Arabella through Catherine Gallagher’s piece, “the Cure of Arabella’s Mind.” It suggests that “the Cure of Arabella’s Mind” is more invested in mediated environments which mix material and immaterial rather than transition and social facts—as most would conclude. The chapter explores the character and conversion of Arabella, whereby, in her attempt to stop believing in apparitions she must herself become one. As a result, the novel presents a sphere of sensory possibility and tests its edges, which, in turn, produces the “romantic” dimension of modern literary realism that today goes by the term atmosphere. (pages 161 - 189)
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In Factitious Airs: Radcliffe’s Priestley - Jayne Elizabeth Lewis
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226476711.003.0009
[gothic fiction, Ann Radcliffe, Deidre Lynch, gothic signature, atmosphere, Joseph Priestley]
Ann Radcliffe’s popular romances of the 1790s marked the widespread literary practice of gothic fiction—the key signature of which is atmosphere. Atmosphere in the gothic sense, however, can pertain to two things. Frist is Deidre Lynch’s illuminating view that the shroud which surrounds the gothic page signals a separation with the Enlightenment’s presumptions of transparency. Second is the fact that gothic fiction is concerned with weather to a much greater extent than any other novelistic subgenre. This focus on and rise in atmosphere in gothic fiction is noted by Radcliffe as a method to produce more chills, to tingle the spine. Joseph Priestley, the leading “aerial philosopher,” is another figure not to be forgotten in this respect, one with whom Radcliffe identified. This chapter is an investigation of Radcliffe’s and Priestley’s sense of atmosphere, and how Radcliffe’s work was possibly influenced by that of Priestley. (pages 190 - 218)
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Priestley’s Radcliffe and the Experimental Gothic - Jayne Elizabeth Lewis
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226476711.003.0010
[carbon dioxide, Ann Radcliffe, Joseph Priestley, romantic organicism, fixed air, factitious air, common air]
It is conclusive that Ann Radcliffe’s writing is a despondent version of Joseph Priestley’s contemporary experiments on, and in, the “different kinds of air. ” Priestley’s relationship with and romance of atmosphere could be said to be somewhere between the romantic organicism of the future and the corpuscular and mechanistic paradigms of the past. Fixed air, or carbon dioxide—the gas that made Priestley’s name—would be the perfect example of this romance, resulting in Priestley seeing what other kinds of “factitious air” might make up “common air.” As it so happened, fixed air appears in Radcliffe’s writing as well, in the popular travelogue of her 1794 tour. This chapter looks at how science and literature seemingly converge into new grounds, and how this encouraged experimentation in gothic fiction. (pages 219 - 250)
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Notes
Index
