Description: In Air's Appearance, Jayne Elizabeth Lewis enlists her readers in pursuit of the elusive concept of atmosphere in literary works. She shows how diverse conceptions of air in the eighteenth century converged in British fiction, producing the modern literary sense of atmosphere and moving novelists to explore the threshold between material and immaterial worlds. Air's Appearance links the emergence of literary atmosphere to changing ideas about air and the earth's atmosphere in natural philosophy, as well as to the era's theories of the supernatural and fascination with social manners--or, as they are now known, "airs." Lewis thus offers a striking new interpretation of several standard features of the Enlightenment--the scientific revolution, the decline of magic, character-based sociability, and the rise of the novel--that considers them in terms of the romance of air that permeates and connects them. As it explores key episodes in the history of natural philosophy and in major literary works like Paradise Lost, "The Rape of the Lock," Robinson Crusoe, and The Mysteries of Udolpho, this book promises to change the atmosphere of eighteenth-century studies and the history of the novel.
Brief description: Jayne Elizabeth Lewis is professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of, most recently, Mary Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation.
Review Quotes: "Jayne Elizabeth Lewis's Air's Appearance is unique in its provocative brilliance and startling originality. Lewis extracts from a comprehensive series of works and authors the revealing interrelationships of atmosphere as a descriptive literary term and as an object of scientific inquiry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In subtlety and suggestiveness, in critical inventiveness, historical range, and intellectual depth, her book is a revelation."-- "John Richetti, University of Pennsylvania"