My dark room spaces of the inner self in eighteenth-century England Spaces of the inner self in 18th-century England Park, Julie 1970- creator author. text bibliography Criticism, interpretation, etc. ilu 2023 2023 monographic eng print 345 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color ) ; 24 cm "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"-- Country House: Making Storylines at Nun Appleton -- Closet: Margaret Cavendish's Writing Worlds -- Grotto: Design and Projection in Alexander Pope's Garden -- Pocket: Pamela's Mobile Settings and Spatial Forms -- Folly: Fictions of Gothic Space in Eighteenth-Century Landscapes. Julie Park. Includes bibliographical references and index. Space and time in literature Self in literature English literature 18th century History and criticism English literature Self in literature Space and time in literature 1700-1799 fast PR448.S69 P37 2023 820.9/353 9780226824758 0226824756 9780226824765 0226824764 9780226824772 2022049686 ICU/DLC 221013 20230901144819.4 in00004742321 eng