Dr Nicoletta Asciuto (IASH Fellow) ‘Farewell, “Gas Stars”!’: Lighting Technologies and the Literary Imagination
This work-in-progress talk will focus on the changes in the literary imagination during the period of technological transition from gaslight to electric lighting (ca. 1880-1925). Electric light in particular was only slowly implemented in Great Britain, and there was a long period of lighting technologies superimposition, both indoors and outdoors, making it possible for one living in 1910 to regularly encounter candles, gas lamps, arc light, and early forms of electricity within the same day. How did poets and writers react to the presence of this new kind of technology?
This talk will report on the current state of my research undertaken at IASH (with a focus on Edinburgh), as well as contextualize it within my previous research on T. S. Eliot’s poetry, and what I hope to do with it next.