Blending a cultural studies approach with scenic spatial analysis, this article provides the first detailed examination of the réverbère à l'huile . in French cultural productions of the early nineteenth century. An emblematic part of the pre-Haussmannian cityscape at a critical historical juncture when street lighting shifts from oil to gas, I argue that artists and writers in the 1830s and 1840s exploit the impending obsolescence of this piece of background street furniture to transform it into a 'site of action' and interrogate the aesthetics of that which usually passes unnoticed in the urban landscape. Through a range of examples from caricature, tableaux de mœurs and popular novels, the spectacular potential of the réverbère à l'huile in texts and images is unpicked to reveal a symbolic spotlight for marginalisation in an age of post-revolutionary social confusion. The mid-nineteenth-century oil lantern thus provides a locus for reflections on the poetic potential of material objects, night as space, as well as invisibility in the urban landscape.
Building similarity graph...
Analyzing shared references across papers
Loading...
Charlotte Berkery
Irish Journal of French Studies
University College Cork
Building similarity graph...
Analyzing shared references across papers
Loading...
Charlotte Berkery (Thu,) studied this question.
www.synapsesocial.com/papers/68c18c169b7b07f3a0614f25 — DOI: https://doi.org/10.7173/164913325840292803