Theresa Braunschneider

This study examines the relations between changing conceptualizations of nighttime, modernity, and gender in a broad range of eighteenth-century British literature, with an emphasis on genres that document contemporary daily life. Arguing that such texts regularly point to the significant increase in nocturnal activity as a defining feature of their “age,” this project trace connections between an emergent understanding of gender as comprised of myriad quotidian acts and new perceptions of the night as a domain of polite sociability, orderly commerce, and rational government.