Beyond Breakdown

Enacting Infrastructural Life with Augustin Daly’s Under the Gaslight

Bibliographic Data

ID13100748
AuthorsÁine O’brien (0000-0002-9527-4076, University of Reading, corresponding author), Joanna Hofer-Robinson (0000-0003-2262-5506, University of Warwick), Nicola Kirkby (0000-0002-6676-0761, Universidad de Londres), Jeremy Brice (0000-0002-8117-7128, Manchester University)
Year2025
Volume11
Issue1
Pages150-167
Publication date2025-01-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeoHumanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2373-5678 • E-ISSN: 2373-566X
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/2373566x.2025.2475033
OpenAlexW4409178833
LanguageEN
References cited28

Alternation between mundane invisibility and spectacular foregrounding is a critical touchstone of infrastructural aesthetics. Infrastructure failures, which often mediate between these states, therefore attract disproportionate attention despite focusing scholarly enquiry on things that no longer function as infrastructure. This article seeks to escape this impasse through analysing cultural artefacts for evidence of processes which are inconspicuous but nevertheless constitute the happenings of infrastructure. Through close readings of Under the Gaslight (1867), a sensation drama which interweaves melodramatic narratives with infrastructural spaces and temporalities, we introduce three techniques for navigating the representational elusiveness of infrastructural processes and relations. We suggest that following fictional characters’ engagements with infrastructures can disclose the experiential textures of mundane infrastructural functioning; that engaging with fiction across historical distance can induce states of alienation which defamiliarise infrastructural processes and render them spectacular; and that examining the infrastructural promises embedded in melodrama can foreground infrastructure’s temporalities

Economics · Water Governance and Infrastructure

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