Association of Adaptation Studies
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We are AAS: scholars of adaptation, intertextuality, intermediality & all the disciplines that involve them. Arguably the best sidebar chat game in online aca-conferencing. Join us! www.adaptation.uk.com YouTube: @associationofadaptationstu3160
![Light was central to the construction of Victorian subjectivities, not only as the support for disciplinary power and colonial control exerted through vision and inspection, but within a broader and multiple field of contingent encounters, artistic techniques, and dramatic situations. From this perspective, the iconic figures of the Victorian eye - the guard in the panoptical tower and the flâneur, the detective and the man in the crowd, the artist and the monster, the crystal palace and the heart of darkness, the hall of mirrors and the slum - can be placed within a more material and situated aesthetic, cultural, and political history of light (see Barnaby, 2017).
Thinking about light in material terms rather than only as metaphor or as disembodied and disembodying vision, can be seen as part of a methodological shift toward new materialism and ecocriticism in the humanities. Like water in the blue humanities (see Mentz, 2024), the materiality of light challenges clear-cut spatial distributions and delimitations, as well as constructions of bodily boundaries and binary attributions of agency and passivity through the look. Light, as Mieke Bal
suggested, "actively contributes to the modification and the transformation of [...] experience" (2007).
The Victorian era's "relentless drive toward spectacular radiance" (Otter, 2008) set some of the conditions of the transition to modernity and its glare and glitter are, in many ways, still with us. Especially given the ongoing popularity of neo-Victorian fictions, and in the context of a constant expansion of the boundaries of the Victorian and the neo-Victorian as academic categories, a focus on material light also becomes an occasion for tracing the afterglow of Victorian visualities as they
still influence the present politics of visibility and aesthetics of perception.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:lpv6yhp6dmo22untxqwopuwp/bafkreig7s3e45tw6qhe3sk2x737x6krlou6hwspniwg4ryiwdr66geoelu)
