My Dark Room

“A beautiful book on the privacies of writing, the rapt silences of the mind’s darkened room, lit by rays of the everyday: the habitations of thought that those before Proust conceived. My Dark Room answers to my sensibility; it teaches me who I am and where I come from, providing new coordinates and new darknesses between the points of light.” * Alexander Nemerov, author of 'The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s' *
“My Dark Room explores the ways in which the camera obscura, both materially and conceptually, provided the corridor through which the interior lives of eighteenth-century subjects passed. In a dazzling sequence of chapters Julie Park captures the excitements and tensions that emerged as imaginative private worlds were projected on real geographies and spaces. My Dark Room will unsettle the now very long-standing assumptions about the primacy of fiction and the novel in the construction of eighteenth-century subjectivities, as it makes a compelling case for the subject in space created  through interior projections.” * Peter de Bolla, University of Cambridge *
“Park animates the camera obscura trope as a perceptual dynamic for which, until now, we've had so few words. She interweaves a material history of the camera obscura with several disciplines until it becomes possible to reenvision eighteenth-century literary fiction as a transhistorical and intermedial home for the psyche. My Dark Room opens interiors we once assumed were shut, unsettling familiar narratives about the post-Enlightenment mind. This lucidly dreamed study is a feat of the critical imagination to be experienced as well as read. It will be admired and referenced for years to come.” * Jayne Lewis, University of California, Irvine *
"My Dark Room is a wonderful mix of discovery and analysis. With an impressive range of historical and philosophical contexts and delightful close readings of architectural and literary works, Park reveals the camera obscura modelling the spatial relationship between mind, landscape, and narrative." * Cynthia Wall, University of Virginia *
"Park is a tireless scholar; she clearly loves what she's discovering spirited away in the archives, and her sense of wonder and delight can be contagious." * Book Post *
“In a book that takes illumination and insight as its subject, [Park’s] meticulous close readings and case studies open up rich possibilities for future work.” * Times Literary Supplement *
"The controlling metaphor of Park's stunningly original argument is the camera obscura, the dark room within which one stands and views external reality as it is transfigured by the space in which it is projected and by the imagination of the individual who perceives it in this space. . . . Park references paintings, letters, furniture, gardens, and other aspects of 18th-century material life to bolster her claim that the dark rooms of the period were the spaces in which the individual's imagination claimed authority over self and experience. Lavishly illustrated, eminently readable, brilliantly argued, utterly convincing. . . . Essential." * Choice *