Jayne Elizabeth LewisProfessor, English |
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Research Interests |
restoration and 18th-century british literature; literature of the supernatural and gothic fiction; history and/of fiction; atmosphere as literary concept and construct within natural philosophy | |
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Academic Distinctions |
ACLS Fellowship UC President's Fellowship NEH Summer Stipend NEH Fellowship UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award |
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| Appointments |
UCLA (1988-2004) UC Irvine (2004-present) |
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Research Abstract |
"We must remember that there is such a thing as atmosphere," wrote Virginia Woolf in 1926. But is there? If so, what is it? And is it a thing at all? My current research looks at how, when and where "atmosphere" emerged as a dimension of literary experience--an emergence which links the history of early fiction with that of natural philosophy. The word "atmosphere" is something of an arriviste in the English lexicon. In the history of modern science, it appeared only in the middle of the seventeenth century as a synonym for "that subtile body that immediately incompasses the Earth, and is filled with all manner of exhalations," while it was not until the descent of gothic mist at the end of the eighteenth century that atmosphere began to be perceived as a vital feature of literary representation–the "dark and stormy night" that would be so dubiously immortalized by the Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. But if the full-blown fogs of Dickens's fictions or Coleridge's frosty midnights were largely nineteenth-century phenomena, my current project aims to trace, and even to explain, the appearance of atmosphere as we know it during the century and a half of compromising advances that we call the Enlightenment. In keeping with the word's root meaning ("sphere of vapors"), my central claim is that, to most occidental moderns anyway, atmosphere is appearance–the making-apparent, if not strictly visible, of the otherwise invisible medium of common air. What's more, one of the most important things that atmosphere makes visible is the inevitably mediated nature of what we call experience. This not only makes atmosphere the ironic shadow of Enlightenment's faith in the self-evident but freights its ‘discovery' with real political significance. Indeed, it is the struggle to legitimate experience through symbolic representation that unifies the otherwise disparate poles of my inquiry: literary history and the history of science. The texts I'm working with range from Boyle's _New Experiments_ to Defoe's _Journal fo the Plague Year_ and _Robinson Crusoe_, and from Arbuthnot's "Effects of Air on Human Bodies__ to Pope's _The Rape of the Lock_ and Radcliffe's gothic novels. | |
| Publications |
_The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1650-1740_ _Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation_ _The Trial of Mary Queen of Scots_ |
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| Link to this profile | http://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=5137 | |
| Last updated | 08/27/2009 | |