My Dark Room

"In what kinds of spaces do we become most aware of the thoughts in our own heads? My Dark Room is a book about the intimate sites of inner experience in eighteenth-century England and their role in the rise both of interiority and the novel. Julie Park considers sites such as grottos, cottages, closets, and especially the camera obscura, that beguiling enclosure into which the outside world is projected through a lens. This type of "dark room" and the projections within it serve Park as a paradigm for the fleeting states of interiority that eighteenth-century figures felt compelled to generate and experience. Park integrates material analyses of these "interior" spaces with close readings of novelistic and proto-novelistic texts. Taken together, these case studies amount to a fresh narrative of the novel's development as a genre of interiority from 1650 to 1811. They include Andrew Marvell's country house poem, Upon Appleton House; Margaret Cavendish's loosely fictional letters about domestic life, Sociable Letters, and the utopian fantasy/critique of the new science, The Blazing World; and Alexander Pope's long poem, Eloisa to Abelard. Park's innovative method of "spatial formalism" reveals how physical settings enable psychic interiors to achieve vitality in fictive and real lives"--