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"Light and darkness in literature."
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The Values of Nighttime in Classical Antiquity
Night, in ancient Greece and Rome, was a mythological figure, a context for specialized knowledge, a semantic space in literature, and a setting for unique experiences. Fifteen case-studies here explore how nighttime was employed in the ascription of specific values in all these areas of ancient culture.
eBook
Intersections in literature and science: the evolution of artificial light in nineteenth-century literature
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.
eBook
The Tale of Darkness in Amos Oz's Literary Work
In this article, I present an analysis of Amos Oz's writings, from his early collection of stories, Where the Jackals Howl (1965) to his autofictional novel A Tale of Love and Darkness (2002). Throughout the tumultuous first five decades of Israel's Independence, Oz's oeuvre consistently expressed an implicit tale of darkness. Darkness is the key figure of the national abyss in Oz's literature. As a political category, Oz's interpretation of darkness bears the traces of postcolonial literature, where darkness is a root metaphor; as a poetic principle, darkness holds the unsaid within the literary text. Marking the unsaid, darkness turns to be a recall for depth hermeneutics, as it acknowledges “the hidden” as a core category of meaning in national literatures.
Journal Article
Light in a Socio-Cultural Perspective
The awareness of \"light\" as both a concept and a phenomenon existed long before it became a matter of scientific interest. This volume investigates the many ways in which light has been conceptualized throughout history. Employing different methodological approaches derived from various disciplines in the humanities, the essays gathered here situate the concept of light within discourses on gender, religion, intellectual life, politics, art, and digital culture. Through diverse perspectives, light is defined - in some cases synchronically - as a physical phenomenon, a visual tool, and a philosophic idea.This book combines the fields of intellectual studies, religion, literature, and visual culture to explore the complexities of conceptual paradigms that represent various manifestations of the idea of light. Through original readings, the contributing authors present a range of scholarly perspectives, offering new interpretations of the idea of light and its history within the humanities.
eBook
Light and darkness in ancient Greek myth and religion
Light and darkness played an important role beyond the division of time in ancient Greek myth and religion; the contributors to Light and Darkness in Ancient Greek Myth and Religion consider its function on both the individual and social level as manifested in modes of thought and behavior and expressed in language, beliefs, ritual, and iconography. The book is divided into five parts: color semantics, appearance and concealment, eye sight/insight, being and beyond, and cult. Each subdivision contains a wealth of information for the reader, ranging from detailed explanations of the interplay between lexical categories that denote darkness and light and the effect of blindness on metaphysical matters to the qualities of cultic light. This unique volume will be of interest to readers in fields as diverse as ancient Greek history, metaphysics, and iconography.
eBook
Literary Illumination
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.
eBook
Dark Nights, Bright Lights
Light and darkness shape our perception of the world. This is true in a literal sense, but also metaphorically: in theology, philosophy, literature and the arts the light of day signifies life, safety, knowledge and all that is good, while the darkness of the night suggests death, danger, ignorance and evil.
A closer inspection, however, reveals that things are not quite so clear cut and that light and darkness cannot be understood as simple binary opposites. On a biological level, for example, daylight and darkness are inseparable factors in the calibration of our circadian rhythms, and a lack of periodical darkness appears to be as contrary to health as a lack of exposure to sunlight. On a cultural level, too, night and darkness are far from being universally condemnable: in fiction, drama and poetry the darkness of the night allows not only nightmares but also dreams, it allows criminals to ply their trade and allows lovers to meet, it allows the pursuit of pleasure as well as deep thought, it allows metamorphoses, transformations and transgressions unthinkable in the light of day. But night is not merely darkness. The night gains significance as an alternative space, as an 'other of the day', only when it is at least partially illuminated.
The volume examines the interconnection of night, darkness and nocturnal illumination across a broad range of literary texts. The individual essays examine historically specific light conditions in literature, tracing the symbolic and metaphoric content of darkness and illumination and the attitudes towards them.
eBook