2026/04/01 by Fiona Amery
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Literature and Culture Studies #Decadence, Literature, and Society #Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation
paper · doi:10.1093/arthis/ulag025
Abstract At the confluence of fin-de-siècle discourses, including theosophy, vitalism, science fiction, exploration narratives, and atmospheric science, the polar atmosphere was imagined, sometimes quite literally, as a transcendent space at the threshold between worlds. Defined by lightness, vapour, and electric charge, it resonated with contemporary ideas about ghostly phenomena and vital energies thought to share these material qualities. Visual culture emerged as a key site for negotiating the atmosphere as a liminal space within the Western imagination. Representations of polar mirages, aurorae, iceblink, and paraselene strained the limits of depiction, their visual indeterminacy reflecting both perceptual uncertainty at the poles and the figurative possibilities of the polar sky as a portal. At times auratic in appearance, such phenomena also operated as analogues to Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘aura’: mysterious, distant, and resistant to visual technologies, they embodied the affective power that he associated with art prior to mechanical reproduction.