WILLIAM CHAPMAN SHARPE. New York Nocturne: The City after Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, 1850-1950. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2008. Pp. xix, 402. $35.00
2010; Oxford University Press; Volume: 115; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/ahr.115.3.851-a
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)Night-time city culture
ResumoFor a book about New York, this one spends a lot of time elsewhere, especially in Europe, in the company of James McNeill Whistler, the first artist to employ the term “nocturne” in the wake of its musical usage, which had begun early in the nineteenth century, Vincent van Gogh, and the classical and romantic painters of moonlight who preceded them. This is a book about modernity and representation, how new experiences of night under different conditions and degrees of illumination exposed the nature of modern city life more clearly than any daytime rendering. Nighttime shadows and spotlights could be marshaled to serve moral, material, and aesthetic arguments more realistically than in art that depended on “natural” moonlight or sun bursting through clouds to depict good and evil, blessing and condemnation. William Chapman Sharpe is not offering us a techno-cultural history, but he does structure his book around five themes...
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