Marković, Ivan
(2020)
Hazy histories: Smoking atmospheres in twentieth-century Britain.
PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
Abstract
This thesis is an epistemological experiment in knowing the past atmospherically. It seeks to address the question of how we might go about recovering, from the historical record, something as hazy, fleeting and potentially intangible as an atmosphere. The thesis tells a story of smoking at four key moments in twentieth century British history: the turn of the 20th century, the Second World War, the 1980s, and lastly, the mid-2000s. The story is narrated through the lens of atmosphere to tease out and foreground the feelings, emotions, senses, rhythms and affects that otherwise remain a backdrop in conventional historical accounts.
The thesis adapts Sumartojo and Pink’s (2018) tripartite approach of knowing about, through and in atmosphere to archival research, and draws on a wide range of material, from newspaper articles, magazines, etiquette guides and diaries to letters, film, photography and material culture. It re-visits sources already considered by historians of smoking, while also introducing as yet unexamined material. The thesis then proposes four specific modes of attunement, materiality, time, conviviality and space, through which the four moments of the smoking past are examined, and past atmospheres conjured. Finally, the thesis makes the case for storytelling as a form of narration that has the unique capacity to compel an atmospheric attunement between the reader and the text, an experiential closeness and intimacy not always required or evoked by academic work, but one that has the potential to regain and hold a past atmosphere in the present.
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