The Lighted Window

Homecoming, haunting, nostalgia, desire: these are some of the themes evoked by the motif of the lighted window in literature and art. In this combination of place-writing, memoir, and cultural study, Peter Davidson takes us on atmospheric walks through nocturnal cities in Britain, Europe, and North America, and revisits the field paths of rural England. Surveying a wide range of material, the book extends, chronologically, from early romantic painting to contemporary fiction, and geographically, from the Low Countries to Japan. It features familiar lighted windows in English literature (in the works of poets such as Thomas Hardy and Matthew Arnold and in the novels of Virginia Woolf, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Kenneth Grahame) and examines the painted nocturnes of James Whistler, John Atkinson Grimshaw, and the ruralist Samuel Palmer.