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  • Modernity, Modernism, and the Aesthetics of Illumination
  • Andrea L. Volpe (bio)
William Chapman Sharpe . New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. ix + 402 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $35.00.

In New York Nocturne, William Sharpe argues that night has a history. Such a history is inextricably linked to technologies of illumination, from gaslight to electricity, that have blurred the distinction between light and dark and have tapped into deeply human responses to symbolic meaning. The human experience of that history then is necessarily about the history of technological innovation, industrialization, and urbanization. In turn, the ways in which this history is represented conveys the essential and changing qualities of modernity—shifting, sometimes agitated identities, accelerations of speed and time (both literal and metaphoric), and heightened sensations of authentic and commodified experiences (as workers or walkers in the illuminated city)—at once dangerous and filled with possibility. Writers, photographers, and painters, Sharpe argues, turned to images of the illuminated night because of the way the lighted night encapsulated and resonated with these sensations and experiences. Such a history is both social and perceptual—it depends on electrification and responses to it—and is the basis here for a cultural history of modernization and modernity told through images of the New York night between 1850 and 1960.

There is something elegantly simple in arguing that night has a history, particularly for the way it makes sense of a rich range of materials from New York's social, literary, and visual heritage without flattening out the range of styles and forms of aesthetic responses inspired by it. Sharpe treats literary and visual representation simultaneously as evidence and mediation. Images and literary texts are evidence of the experience of modernity; but they are always representations of it, not facts. Sharpe is explicitly not concerned with what he calls the "reality" of urban life, but he focuses instead "on how creative individuals have in memorable ways depicted and reinterpreted" changing urban life "for themselves and their audiences" (p. 3). Artists and writers are conceptualized as particularly prescient figures, with powers of observation [End Page 597] and representation that stand in for and speak for an entire culture. In turn, they are not merely "recording the novel sights of the city"—their representations "educated their audiences in modes of perception" (pp. 2–3). In other words, they are agents of a greater cultural and historical transformation. Steeped in detail and finely rendered close readings, Sharpe approaches the painters, writers, and photographers who made such images as prescient. In their renderings of the "radical alteration caused by the advance of light into hitherto dark hours" (p. 1), he contends that their perceptions of these experiences became one of the hallmarks of modern art.

That culture representations constitute their moment is an argument that is a crucial foundation of cultural history because it moves literature and images out of the purely evidentiary or the purely imaginative, as well as out of the shadow of base and superstructure. Thus such culture becomes a causative force and the subject of history. Sharpe's concern with modernity and modernism—one social, the other aesthetic, joined together by a shift in perception that has social and material roots—is just the sort of history Neil Harris had in mind when he called for an intellectual history of stylistic change so that iconography and "changes in the manipulation of images" could become the basis for a history of "mind and consciousness." Such projects would demand "sensitivities that span several areas of interest, and a good deal of aggressive juxtaposition."1New York Nocturne displays such qualities of mind and design in the way it opposes technology, urban history, and artistic production.

To bring this task to the sheer varieties of New York's literary and visual modernism, however, is still a daunting task. The problem, as Casey Nelson Blake noted, is to impose narrative coherence on such a vast subject.2New York Nocturne does accomplish this, with the qualification that any narrative arc will reveal as much by what is absent from it as by what is present. (The Armory Show...

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