In the beginning was the night. All light, shapes, language, and subjective consciousness, as well as the world and art depicting them, emerged from this formless chaos. In fantasy, we seek to return to this original darkness. Particularly in literature, visual representations, and film, the night resiliently resurfaces from the margins of the knowable, acting as a stage and state of mind in which exceptional perceptions, discoveries, and decisions play out.
Elisabeth Bronfen investigates the nocturnal spaces in which extraordinary events unfold, and casts a critical eye into the darkness that enables the irrational exploration of desire, transformation, ecstasy, transgression, spiritual illumination, and moral choice. She begins with an analysis of classical myths depicting the creation of the world and then moves through night scenes in Shakespeare and Milton, Gothic novels and novellas, Hegel's romantic philosophy, and Freud's psychoanalysis. Bronfen also demonstrates how modern works of literature and film, particularly film noir, can convey that piece of night the modern subject carries within. From Mozart's "Queen of the Night" to Virginia Woolf 's oscillation between day and night, life and death, and chaos and aesthetic form, Bronfen renders something visible, conceivable, and comprehensible from the dark realms of the unknown.
- Table of Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Prologue: My Queen of the Night
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Exile of the Star-Blazing Queen in the Magic Flute
- PART I: COSMOGONIES OF THE NIGHT
- 1. Nyx and Her Children
- 2. Let There Be Darkness
- 3. Hegel's Night of the World
- 4. Freud's Night Side of the Soul
- PART II: NIGHT TALKS
- 5. Shakespeare's Night World
- 6. Freud's Book of Dreams
- 7. A Poetics of Insomnia
- PART III: GOTHIC NIGHTS
- 8. Moral Temptations of the Night
- 9. Seeing the World Darkly
- 10. Night's Doubles
- 11. The Nocturnal Flaneur
- PART IV: NIGHT AND FILM NOIR
- 12. Return of a Hollywood Star
- 13. Nocturnal Desire of the Femme Fatale
- 14. Into the Night
- 15. Fate and Chance
- PART V: THE ETHICS OF AWAKENING
- 16. What Lies at the End of the Night
- 17. George Eliot's Dawn
- 18. Edith Wharton's Twilight
- 19. Virginia Woolf's Nights and Days
- Bibliography
- Index
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