New York Nocturne: The City After Dark in Literature, Painting, and Photography, 1850-1950
by William Chapman Sharpe
Princeton University Press | November 2008 | ISBN-10: 0691133247 | PDF | 424 pages | 32.4 mb

As early as the 1850s, gaslight tempted New Yorkers out into a burgeoning nightlife filled with shopping, dining, and dancing. Electricity later turned the city at night into an even more stunning spectacle of brilliantly lit streets and glittering skyscrapers. The advent of artificial lighting revolutionized the urban night, creating not only new forms of life and leisure, but also new ways of perceiving the nocturnal experience. New York Nocturne is the first book to examine how the art of the gaslit and electrified city evolved, and how representations of nighttime New York expanded the boundaries of modern painting, literature, and photography. Exploring the myriad images of Manhattan after dark, New York Nocturne shows how writers and artists took on the city's nocturnal blaze and transformed the scintillating landscape into an icon of modernity.

The book traces key metaphors of the nighttime city: a seductive Babylon in the mid-1850s, a misty fairyland colonized by an empire of light in the early twentieth century, and a skyscraper-studded land of desire that became a stage for the voyeurism and violence of the 1940s and 1950s. The epilogue suggests how these themes have continued to shape our vision of nighttime New York ever since. Abundantly illustrated, New York Nocturne includes original readings of works by Whitman, Poe, Whistler, Riis, Stieglitz, Abbott, O'Keeffe, Stella, Hopper, Weegee, Ellison, Jacquette, and many others. Collectively, they tell a fascinating story about the relationship between night, art, and modern urban life.

Winner of the 2009 Peter C. Rollins Award, Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association

CONTENTS
List of illustrations xi
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction The Dream Site 1
Chapter One Gaslit Babylon 37
Chapter Two The Nocturne: Moonlight, Metamorphosis, and Modernism 80
Chapter Three Colonizing the Night 132
Chapter Four The Empire of Light 170
Chapter Five Skyscraper Fantasy 217
Chapter Six Staging the Night: Theater, Voyeurism, Violence 266
Epilogue Night Now 319
Notes 349
Index 393
 
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