From Light to Dark

Tim Edensor teaches cultural geography at Manchester Metropolitan University (UK). He is the author of Tourists at the Taj; National Identity, Popular Culture, and Everyday Life; and Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics, and Materiality.

• ContentsIntroduction: Geographies of Light and DarkPart I. Light1. Seeing with Landscape, Seeing with Light2. Under the Dynamic Sky: Living and Creating with LightPart II. Illumination3. Electric Desire: Lighting the Vernacular and Illuminating Nostalgia4. Caught in the Light: Power, Inequality, and Illumination5. Festivals of Illumination: Painting and Playing with Light6. Staging Atmosphere: Public Extravaganzas and Homely DesignsPart III. Dark7. Nocturnes: Changing Meanings of Darkness8. The Re-enchantment of Darkness: The Pleasures of NoirConclusion: The Novelty of Light and the Value of DarknessAcknowledgmentsBibliographyIndex

"Illumination is one of the aspects of life that has become so obvious we have stopped noticing it. In this innovative and illuminating book, Tim Edensor provides an elegant and necessary account of light and dark, their role in the production of everyday life, the stories we tell about them, and the emotions they engender.  He has performed a key task of any critical thinker-taking the obvious and making it visible again."-Tim Cresswell, Trinity College"The wealth of sources and documents one finds in From Light to Dark is one of the great merits of the book."-Leonardo"With many such insights and many more examples of the ways in which we may reframe the scholarship of modern perception and sensory experience, From Light to Dark certainly deserve[s] further attention."-Journal of Design History