Julie Park

Assistant Professor of English, Vassar College

Long-term fellowship

Dark Rooms and Moving Objects: Mediating Interior Life in Eighteenth-Century England (Folger, 2013-2014)

This book tells the story of how eighteenth-century English subjects created interior worlds for themselves with things, spaces, and texts that simultaneously revealed and concealed their innermost states of being, the freshly conceived domains of thinking, feeling, and consciousness. Just as architectural theories of the period began to emphasize interior spaces as critical aspects of building design, eighteenth-century writers registered the importance of capturing interior experience as the object of narration for another new type of physical dwelling—the book object now known as the novel. In grottos, detachable pockets, ornamented cottages, and camera obscuras, as well as long poems, novels, and architectural treatises, this book finds new answers to enduring questions about what it means to have an inner life in a modern world of proliferating spaces and things.

Blogs

Guest post, The Collation: Interiority and Jane Porter’s pocket diary