Awarded Honorable Mention, James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Association of America
My Dark Room: Spaces of the Inner Self of Eighteenth-Century England (University of Chicago Press, 2023) reveals how eighteenth-century English subjects created their interior worlds with the material spaces of everyday life. Functioning much like the camera obscura (Latin for "dark room")—the room- or box-sized visual device that fascinated viewers throughout the period—these spaces projected, animated and housed one's innermost states of being. Such states consistently enlarged and engaged the freshly conceived domain of the imagination.
Just as architectural theories of the period began to emphasize interior space as critical aspects of building design, eighteenth-century writers recognized the importance of capturing interior experience and its spaces as the object of narration for a range of literary texts, from long poems and experimental prose works to novels. In camera obscuras, writing closets, grottos, cottages and other built environments, this book reveals what it means to have an inner life in a modern world of proliferating spaces, real and imagined.
By looking at the material world not so much in terms of its objects, but its spaces, this book takes a new approach to the bonds between humans and the material world that have been preoccupying the humanities and social sciences lately. With its conceptual framework of “spatial formalism,” My Dark Room challenges prior assumptions about the literary concept of setting. Rather than a static element in day to day life, setting functions as an interactive and intermedial structure for embodied acts of feeling and imagining, in lived experiences and on the page.